FESTA 2018: Photo essay
At FEASTA! The University of Auckland presented The Procession: a client-based design for the Urban Monk, specialist in fermented vegetables. The ease of assembly and disassembly enables future use of the installation.
FESTA 2018’s headline event FEASTA! transformed a city block.
The Little Asia food market and cultural performance area was framed by the University of Adelaide’s installation, which made use of Hills Hoist clotheslines and hats for lanterns.
The individual plates of University of Technology Sydney’s (UTS) Cottage Connection captured food memories on the reverse side.
The University of Technology Sydney’s Form Follows Feast used bamboo to create a pavilion for feasting and gathering.
At FEASTA!: The New Zealand Institute of Architects Canterbury created Joy in Sharing, a welcoming space complete with dance music and juicery.
A Canterbury brew bar, curated by Punky Brewster, and lots of great things to eat proved popular at FEASTA!.
Guests enjoying Form Follows Feast at FEASTA! on 20 October 2018.
The University of Auckland’s Social Sustenance was a moveable infrastructure that contained interactive components for sharing food – it moved throughout the headline event.
Cultural performances and food brought the Little Asia food market to life at the headline event, FEASTA!.
Cottage Connection by night – a studio from University of Technology Sydney that explored connections between place, memories and food.
At FEASTA!: The NZIA Canterbury branch studio, Sounds Like Dinner , explored future food nostalgia – where food is a multi-sensory experience.
Artist Rongomaiaia Te Whaiti’s Pāraerae – comprising 169 suspended pāraerae (footwear).
Pāraerae were common in the cold and rough terrains of Te Waipounamu and were an essential item for those moving through ngā ara tawhito (traditional travel routes) harvesting, gathering and trading seasonal kai.
Manaaki Whenua presented an exhibition of native edible plants collected by Captain Cook on his first voyage to New Zealand.
The Death Café, where people, often strangers, gather in a supportive environment to talk about death.
The meeting point for the Biking Bee Adventure, an exploration of pollinator friendly sites in Christchurch.
Cultivate Urban Farm’s giant seedling sale.
Mapping Moments, Alex Bonham’s mapping project that collected memories of feasting, fasting and foraging.
The Big Band Picnic at the Botanical Gardens.
A Communal Loaf hosts a communal dinner as part of its Bread Companion project.
Freerange Press hosted a symposium discussing all things food.
Fab Lab teamed up with Food Resilience Network for the Fabricating Future Farming Workshop.
Nik Mavromatis takes us for a walk through Christchurch’s drinking and dining past in the Last Call walking tour.
Simon Gray of A Communal Loaf running bread-making workshops at the Philipstown Community Hub.
Food-themed Storytimes at Christchurch’s new central library, Tūranga.
The closing night event – an evening of movies in the Botanic Gardens presented by the Food Resilience Network and Southern Seed Exchange with movie snacks grown by the Canterbury Community Gardens Association.
A festival that celebrates both architecture and food might raise some eyebrows, but food’s potential for positive impact in shaping our spaces and practices – our urban fabric – is something worth exploring.
Over the course of Labour Weekend, FESTA, the biennial celebration of urban creativity took place in Christchurch. Our team of five, our board and a large group of collaborators and volunteers came together to present 50 plus events as part of this public festival of architecture, design and food.
Given Christchurch’s historical relationship with food and due to the increased awareness of where our food comes from post-earthquake, as well as the range of initiatives working in this space, food was the natural lens through which to examine city-making and an ever-changing Christchurch for this edition of FESTA.
The 2018 creative director Barnaby Bennett recently wrote, “Each of the festivals, and each of the events and installations at the festival, is trying to bring people into the city to have a positive experience and to create interactions and engagements that might provoke thought and reflections about the city at the same time.”
Without a doubt, the collective reimagining of central Christchurch that took place on Saturday 20 October called FEASTA!, was the highlight of the FESTA 2018 weekend. (Incidentally, the headline event is also the biggest single architectural event in New Zealand.)
At FEASTA! approximately 12,000 people poured into the city centre for a vibrant celebration of architecture, community and food. A city block was transformed with 17 architectural and artistic projects along with the performances, markets, music, family activities and lots of great things to eat and drink that activated these spaces.
This year, members of the Canterbury branches of the New Zealand Institute of Architects, as well as the New Zealand Institute of Landscape Architects (NZILA), joined students from across New Zealand and Australia in designing and fabricating the imaginative installations, which explored themes from The Future of Food through to Public Feasting. They brought alive for a night the imaginings of how and where we might share food and how we might do so in the future in light of pressing challenges. And, collectively, they did so at an urban scale.
The NZILA’s Biodiversity Beacons, which were dotted around the site, demonstrated how we can design to provide food for other species; the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) studio Cottage Connection highlighted people’s experiences of the city through food – samples of edible products by small-scale producers were collected and displayed as artefacts, and available to exchange for an oral history.
The NZIA’s Sounds like Dinner offered a projected future experience of food nostalgia – where food is a multi-sensory experience involving sound recordings and video clips of food preparation, rather than an item for consumption. Form Follows Feast, another installation from UTS, used bamboo to create a large-scale pavilion for festival goers to gather and feast in, while the University of Adelaide combined Hills Hoist clotheslines and Vietnamese lantern hats to create a Little Asia eating area. Ara’s Demonstration Station was a stage set comprising a retro stovetop, with an oversized coffee pot – riffing on cooking TV sets and pop art, the installation was activated with quick-fire talks and food demonstrations throughout the night.
Food is the great connector. We wanted FESTA’s 2018 food-themed programme to be an open invitation to Cantabrians and visitors to come into the city and experience, as well as bring to life, the ever-evolving place. In doing so, the festival explored how we interact with the built environment, each other and public spaces through food.
Outside of the main event, FESTA 2018 put on a packed schedule of talks, workshops, tours and community events all weekend long. Check out the image gallery above to get a glimpes of this lively event in the heart of Christchurch.
