Soil is our gold
UK-based Miche Fabre Lewin and Flora Gathorne-Hardy are in Johannesburg on a three-month international arts residency with the Bag Factory in Fordsburg. The duo founded Touchstone Collaborations in the UK as a socially engaged arts and research practice that is dedicated to thinking with nature and living in balance with the Earth. The practice inspires a sensuous experience of the connections between healthy soil, healthy food, healthy bodies and a healthy planet.
Their residency is entitled Renaturing the City and explores how arts, research and ecological interventions can bring the living food cycle – composting, growing, harvesting, food rituals, cooking and sharing food – back into the heart of neighbourhood communities.
Inspired by living in Joburg's Maboneng Precinct, Miche and Flora have partnered with local enterprises to co-evolve pavement banquets, OPEN dining experiences, and an organic box scheme. They are also supporting Cooking Out of the Box, a pioneering workshop with the JHB Culinary School to inspire cooking with nature and the senses.
This year Miche and Flora will be joining us at the third annual Sanlam Investments FoodWineDesign Fair, where they'll be collaborating with the Trevor Huddleston Memorial Centre (THMC) and the Kofifi Youth Theatre, both of which are based in Sophiatown. Through outreach workshops, Miche and Flora are working with Kofifi to reconnect to soil as a first step in the design and planting of an urban food garden within the landscape of the THMC's new community theatre.
Their stand for FoodWineDesign, Taste the Garden, is a culinary installation that has arisen out of this partnership. Here, visitors will experience intimate tastes and food rituals which inspire a remembering of how living foods reconnect us to soil, spirit and community. Miche and Flora will be sharing with visitors the source of vital organic foods, artisan traditions and health-giving water from within the region.
Join us from 23-25 November on the rooftop of Hyde Park Corner to be a part of the sensory experience.