Exploring Edible Ecologies
Titanik Gallery, Turku, Finland
July 29—August 3 2025
Credits
Artist: Alejandra Alarcón
Curatorial Text: Alejandra Alarcón and Micol Curatolo
Leaflet Graphic Design: Juan Guevara Verjel
Cake Trolley and Jelly Cabinet Design and Production Collaboration: Paula Karvonen, Peltin
Collage Blanket Production: Sofia Dinello
This exhibition is supported by the Kone Foundation
In the middle of the gallery, a collaged blanket delineates a space for gathering. This visual diary invites us closer to ground level, as we would while foraging, hosting spatial relations that have to do with proximity and closeness. The blanket is composed of memories from the past year—cloth dyed with foraged berries, an array of analogue and digital photographs, plant sketches, and diary entries—as well as pieces of cloth collected from recycling centers and fabrics gifted by friends. During the public performances, Alarcón’s colourful cakes and ephemeral jellies will be served as a delicious mouthful of her research over the last year, each flavoured by the harvest of her walks. Alarcón uses cake as a medium to create Edible Landscapes—sculptures layered with flavour and meaning. They are always inspired by a specific location and context, often taking the form of treats to be enjoyed communally while discovering new flavours and reflecting on personal and shared experiences of conviviality. Each cake is presented as an edible collage, with ingredients like berries, plant parts, and flowers that transport the audience to specific seasons and become part of those who ingest them. The notes, publications, and images in the exhibition have been gathered as a way of documenting her foraging practice: alternative maps of a relational geography populated by small and generous plants. Exploring Edible Ecologies is a project to smell, read, look and taste. The exhibition follows not only the artist’s personal inquiry, asking: How do I live here?; but poses a qualitative and collective question, too: How do we live here well?
The many concepts nestled in this exhibition can help us sense the interdependence that defines our lives with the living world. A central idea is that of reciprocity—the understanding that care and nourishment must flow both ways between humans and more-than-humans. Rather than an extractive relationship, this approach recognizes that when we are our landscapes—when we carry them in our bodies, memories, and practices—flourishing is mutual: taking only what is needed, giving back in return, and paying attention to the rhythms of the land. Living well, as way of ensuring a good livelihood for all, nurtures a brighter sense of dignity and a comradeship with our social and geographical companions. This desire for a mutually good life reminds us to demand more than the bare minimum of a safe individual existence. Alarcón’s practice becomes a way of cultivating intimacy with specific geographies and tuning into the rhythms of others. Fungi, plants, and animals reveal different ways of perceiving time. Each walk becomes a moment of knowledge that her body relates and stores. A slow, ongoing process of becoming part of a place—and in return, letting it become part of herself.
Exploring Edible Ecologies welcomes us to share over a meal the experiences of interacting with the resources and contradictions of our neighbouring plants and humans. Repetitions, seasonal rhythms and a quieter, more intimate form of attention emerge from this study, where personal memories and embodied learning merge with anthropology, biology and design. Like a spoonful of organic honey familiarises our bodies to the local pollen that irritates our allergies, so Alarcón’s work explores domestic and genuine tools for learning about the complexity of our territory: Walking as a way of knowing, Being sensorial, Tending, Noticing. Cooking and eating together are acts of conviviality that quite literally transform our bodies for more harmonic encounters.
Photo by Jesper Dolgov.
Photo by Jesper Dolgov.
Photo by Jesper Dolgov.
Photo by Jesper Dolgov.