climavore x jameel at rca food action awards

CLIMAVORE x Jameel at RCA is a research initiative that reimagines foodways for drylands and wetlands. A partnership between CLIMAVORE and Community Jameel at the RCA, it advances ecological networks to produce new knowledge and action towards spatial justice. Based in the School of Architecture, the three-year partnership has two focussed research projects, which will be complemented with these two awards to develop CLIMAVORE projects world wide.

Since the Industrial Revolution and especially after WWII, seasons have been shifting at unexpected rates, together with the food produce and harvests that are meant to follow them. Longer dry periods and more extreme monsoon-related events in central India are severely affecting grain harvest. Hotter winters in the east coast of the US deprive trees of the chill hours they require to bear stone fruit. Prolonged dry spells during the rainy season in Ghana and Ivory Coast are threatening cocoa supply in the world’s top producing countries. In Europe, the first day of spring has advanced by six to eight days in the past thirty years. Wine harvests in Burgundy, France, now start in mid-August, almost a month earlier than many decades ago. Signs that once allowed us to organise life around seasons are a sign of an imminent collapse.

In the climate crisis new seasons are emerging, defined by droughts, heatwaves, polluted seas, soil infertility, movement of deserts or invasive species.

CLIMAVORE x Jameel at RCA launches the 2024 Food Action Awards inviting proposals to identify new seasons of the climate crisis and their manifestation in other geographies facing similar conditions along the broken food chain. Proposals should include research into responses that take into consideration particular geographies, legacies and possible futures to address how we eat as humans change the climate.

This is an opportunity to connect new seasons, grounded ideas, activist networks and geographies in flux to the wider CLIMAVORE platform. Awards will allow the production of independent research to be developed on the corresponding sites; individual support and interaction with the CLIMAVORE x Jameel at RCA team; and meetings to discuss thematic and methodological aspects of the project.

The situated research awards are open to international practitioners, collectives and researchers in the areas of architecture, visual arts, food studies, farming, environmental humanities or any other related discipline. The aim is to support infrastructural prototypes, field trials, landworkers solidarity networks, BIPOC farming initiatives, queer ecologies or microclimatic environments among other strategies towards building alternative diets that benefit human and nonhuman nourishing.