Esparto and Cane

A creative residency that brought Scottish and Portuguese artists and artisans together in Loulé, to generate a synergy of discussions and practices about community, bringing them into the contemporary space where arts, crafts and culture merged together. A meal evoking the rural practice of everybody working together to assert the values of mutual aid and sharing as a solution for a more sustainable future.

The meal is a metaphor that speaks of community. An artistic intervention that brings the themes of the territory and the common good to contemporaneity. people, a challenge. Prepare a meal in which absolutely everything is made by the participants as a group: the table, the pans, the cutlery, the plates, the cups… the menu.
Twelve days, twelve people, one challenge. The challenge given to the group was to work together to prepare a meal in which every single part of would be made jointly using the resources of the territory – the inland part of the municipality of Loulé.

The food would dictate the specific items that had to be made but would also evoke the tale that needed to be told, the tale of the resilience of the rural communities in the Barrocal and uplands of the Algarve, of the scarcity of food and of the clever way the sparse resources were put to the best possible use. In a word: survival.