- Sustainability Institute, Lynedoch, South Africa
Our Living Cultures collaboration with the Sustainability Institute embraces working with the chef and kitchen team, gardeners, tutors and students, to explore how the living food cycle of growing, cooking, sharing and recycling of food waste can be deeply embedded within its organisational culture. This on-going collaboration has included Kitchen Culture Meets Agriculture – a cycle of food citizenship lunches embedded how, every day and every mouthful, we can become active and powerful in shaping our food and farming futures.
Alongside, a sequence Ritual Workshops offered skills-sharing in making compost, fermenting cabbage, and nurturing the ecology of honeybee colonies. These were safe spaces for imagination, feelings, memories, intuition to surface as part of exploring new visions of what is possible – conversations that continue through hosting forums such as Agroecology Indaba and on-going research and pedagogical exchanges.
“
The importance of the work, the main thing that really strikes me is the knitting and weaving of relationships. And that was achieved by actually listening to people who had not been listened to.
Dr Jess Schulschenk, Co-Director of the Sustainability Institute
“
Someone who would be called a gardener, a cleaner and a programme manager coming together to a level of sharing with one another. I think then this is very important to building communities. Part of the conversation is around that, how do we build this community and your kind of work, the food, the ritual, is helping to build that.
Theo Oldjohn, participant in Agroecology Indaba
Resources | Read more about the ritual workshops in Dr Patricia Gaya’s chapter
‘Towards ever more extended epistemologies: pluriversality and decolonisation of knowledges in participatory inquiry’ (2021) in Handbook of Participatory Inquiry Burns, D., Howard, J. & Ospina, S. (eds.)