The exhibition explores urban and architectural settings by questioning how we can incorporate principles of conviviality, as opposed to industrial (over)productivity, into landscapes surrounding food production. Bringing together architecture, urbanism, environmental journalism, art, and science, it stages statistical analyses alongside material installations to explore questions such as:

What spatial infrastructures feed the city?

How are controlled environments urbanizing agriculture?

How do coupled commodity chains remake territories?

What architectures govern animals-as-infrastructure?

How are climate and geopolitics redrawing agrarian space?

What are the oceanic and riparian geographies of protein?

How can living soil become design infrastructure?

The storyline features food products as anthropomorphised characters, including a tomato, a strawberry, a salmon, tropical fruits, a cow and a bull, an octopus, a carp and a shrimp, soy, grains, and a worm. In a metabolic process where one product is consumed by another, and waste, supporting materials, and food are absorbed into a giant cycle of labour, territories, and capital, these protagonists are selected as they not only feed one another, but also embody major food challenges that Europe faces. These include the Dutch nitrogen crisis, the rise of AI-driven climate-controlled environments for food production, the desertification of Sicilian soils, the overfishing of European seas, the dissolution of the breadbasket regions, and the migrant crisis surrounding cheap manual labour linking Europe and Africa.

Additionally, they represent a range of universally essential—or are they?—foods that our bodies require, such as fruits and vegetables, milk and meat, fish and grain, with their histories playing an important role in European legislation and constitutions. Finally, these cases share trade routes and actors, such as companies, universities, governments, and, eventually, labour that operates them. The architecture at stake is not solely a building, but a set of spatial and territorial constellations created to respond to economic demands that drive these productions.

About the Architekturmuseum der TUM

Architekturmuseum der TUM is the world’s leading architectural museum whose thematic scope focuses on issues of social responsibility and the environment. Its curriculum could be browsed through a range of international exhibitions, books, conferences, and active public programs. These formats bridge architecture, art, and scientific research projects that have been developed at the Technical University of Munich. The Architekturmuseum, in this way, stands between serving as a platform for the university discourses and being part of one of the biggest German art and design museums, Pinakothek der Moderne. In terms of space, the museum occupies 600 m2 of the groundfloor area of Pinakothek der Moderne, and stands in Munich’s central quarter, Kunstareal, which comprises 18 museums, 20 galleries, and six universities settled around Munich Königsplatz.

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Curators and Project Management

Andres Lepik, Andjelka Badnjar

Co-curators for the exhibition segment on cattle farming

Victor Muñoz Sanz, Sofia Nannini

Co-curator for the exhibition segment on soil

Sinan von Stietencron

Assistant Curators

Stefan Pielmeier, Bram Terwogt

Public Programme

Dietlind Bachmeier

Exhibition Design

Amelie Steffen, Maximilian Atta, Jan Müller

Exhibition Installations—Material Research and Development

Niklas Fanelsa, Julia Ihls, Öykü Tok

Graphic Design

strobo B M Visual Communication

Julian von Klier, Sabrina Baumann, Matthias Friederich

Montages by Kees de Klein

Films

Nicole Humiński, Nikolai Huber

Sommerküche Conception and Design

Tillmann Gebauer, Sebastian Zitzmann, Alice Ianakiev

Supported by

PIN. Freunde der Pinakothek der Moderne e.V. and the co-operation partner of Allianz

Stiftung Kunst und Natur

Politecnico di Torino

BSR BPR Dr. Schäpertöns Consult

Freundeskreis Architekturmuseum TUM

Partner institutions

Stiftung Kunst und Natur, TUM Venture Labs Food / Agro / Biotech, Professorship of Architecture and Design, TUM School of Engineering and Design, Haus der bayerischen Landwirtschaft Herrsching, Kunstareal Munich, TU Delft Department of Urbanism, Politecnico di Torino, University of Almería, The Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), University of Porto, trase.earth (Stockholm Environment Institute), Oceanloop, BayWa AG.