The taste is smoky and salty, the bite is crunchy and the umami-like aftertaste is reminiscent of anchovies. ‘It is brown algae, just harvested here off the Flemish coast,’ says Flemish theater maker Sien Vanmaele. ‘If dried in the right way, you can use it like bacon from the sea.’ The aromatic brown algae is a garnish for ‘fish balls without fish’ based on sunflower seeds and capers. ‘The seas are becoming more and more overfished. This is a sustainable alternative.’
The snacks are part of her ‘Cooking workshop in preparation for the end of the world’. In a centuries-old kitchen with a wooden pump and stove in the basement of the Design Museum Gent, Sien Vanmaele teaches about twenty participants how to adapt their diet to climate change. In addition to vegetarian sea appetizers, she serves licorice-like vodka from ice herb. In a post-apocalyptic world, we eat with our hands, which are cleaned with fragrant sea buckthorn oil. Tired eyes are soothed with wet seaweed compresses.
The cooking workshop is part of the Design Fest Gent. This new, ten-day festival is spread across the city center of Ghent. There are activities in the Industrial Museum, the DaDa Chapel (a distillery in a chapel) and the art museum SMAK. The main location is the design museum. This museum will close for at least 2.5 years due to a major renovation. The four floors are already empty and that offers an excellent opportunity to fill them with lectures, concerts and an exhibition on sustainable design. Each day focuses on a different topic, such as food, water, circular construction and contemporary craft.
The Design Fest Gent, which can be visited until Sunday, should become the Belgian version of the Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven, says head curator Siegrid Demyttenaere. ‘In the Netherlands, it is widely recognized that design can contribute to major issues such as climate change, data privacy and inclusivity. Here people still think of fun stuff and commercial sales pitches when they think of design. We want to turn that around. That is why we hardly show ready-made furniture, but we do show projects that investigate alternative raw materials from fungi or polluted sludge, for example.’
The social repositioning of design in Belgium will not immediately succeed with the first edition, emphasizes the curator. ‘With a festival every two years, we aim for slowness and depth. We do not participate in the rat race of annual new collections of interior brands.’
The majority of the 160 projects at the main exhibition are multifunctional; designers collaborate with artists, computer programmers and scientists such as microbiologists or political scientists. The boundaries of what design can be are also stretched with performances, sound installations and mini-documentaries. Few ready-made solutions are offered. Problems such as food scarcity or sea level rise are too complex for that. Or as Vanmaele puts it: ‘We have to shape our society in a different way. To do this, we first have to explore the options available to do so.’
Sien Vanmaele’s food performance is a good representation of the current themes at Design Fest Gent. The starting point for its climate-proof menu is the sea. ‘The rise in sea level forces us to look at our food supply differently,’ says Vanmaele. For over two years she spoke with oyster farmers, maritime biologists and cooks on the European coasts, among others.
One of her ingredients is sea aster, a vegetable that grows well in saline soil. She also uses Japanese berry weed. ‘It’s an exotic species, so you can eat as much of it as you want. Moreover, we will see them here more and more because of global warming.’
Design Fest Gent, until 1/5.