ROME.- Every year all round the world a third of the food that is produced is wasted or lost (that’s 1.3 billion tons!); the losses and the waste are equal to 680 billion dollars in industrialized countries, and 310 billion in developing countries. Every single day in Mumbai (India) 4,000 people known as dabbawala deliver 160,000 meals cooked at home by mothers and wives for the city’s workers. There are architects who have designed beehives for the city, and artists who have turned food sharing into an art form; masters of twentieth-century architecture who have planned ideal cities where the urban and the agricultural spaces are integrated, and contemporary studies that have designed fruit and vegetable markets that are transformed into spaces for events.

Each day the issues linked to food and nutrition have an impact on people’s “vital space,” starting from the domestic environment and ultimately influencing the planet’s equilibrium . These themes are dealt with in the exhibition FOOD dal cucchiaio al mondo, curated by Pippo Ciorra along with the staff of MAXXI Architettura and MAXXI Arte (May 29 – November 8, 2015). A huge project involving about 2,500 square meters of exhibition space that MAXXI dedicates to the social dimension of food in the year of EXPO Milano 2015, realized in collaboration with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and with the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP)

FOOD dal cucchiaio al mondo tells of visions, traditions and different experiences, presenting architectural projects, stories and works of art. Visitors roam from the Chashitsu, the room where the Japanese tea ceremony is prepared, to images of the famous Pig Roast performance in New York in 1971 by Gordon Matta-Clark, from designs by Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright and Ignazio Gardella, to the surreal installation of the Giant Mushroom by Carsten Holler, from the food of astronauts, to the first modern kitchen designed in 1926 in Frankfurt, to the hyper-contemporary one designed by Snøhetta for American chef Thomas Keller. Also on display is Van Bergen Kolpa Architecten’s farm of the future, the video Alphabet by the artist Mohamed Allam, and an ad hoc performance for the exhibition by the Chinese artists called Yangjiang Group. More than 50 works by artists, architects, designers, photographers which accompany the public in its discovery of how production, transportation, storage, distribution, consumption, disposal and waste in food products are key factors in the production and shape of space.

“With this exhibition MAXXI takes on the task of deeply exploring and manifesting the contradictions connected to the space of food, the blessings and curses, the glamour and misery of humanity,” says Pippo Ciorra, curator of the exhibition. “We attempt to do this by comparing, without filters, the many visions of the world and the space of food, which accompany a theme that merges profit, style and luxury with questions of global ethics, planetary biopolitics, social and human emergencies that leave us gasping for breath. What we are presenting is not an exhibition about food, nor is it an overview of how food has ‘inspired’ architects and artists; rather, our focus is to explore that vast area in which food and design – architectural, urban, artistic – join together to contribute to defining the physical and conceptual space in which we live.”

FOOD dal cucchiaio al mondo is divided into six sections: starting from the body and – by way of the house, the street, the city, the landscape – arriving at the world, that is, the major issues of geopolitics and the world’s layout for the production/distribution of food.

THE EXHIBITION SECTIONS
BODY. This section examines the ritual, religious and intimate aspects of space as it relates to food. Introduced by a tribute to Baroque art (The Rebuke of Adam and Eve by Domenichino), it guides the visitor toward a discovery of how the gestures required by the master of the tea ceremony are essential towards a definition of the module of domestic space in Japan; of how the representation of the meal can cause one to ponder the spatial and temporal size of the cell of the deadman walking (in Hargreaves’ photographs); of how food interprets the “outer space” estrangement from space of astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti.

HOUSE. While the Bauhaus masters were defining the overall concept of the dwelling, Margarethe Schütte-Lihotzky, thanks to her revolutionary concept of the “fitted kitchen,” was shaping the modern domestic space. In addition to a reconstruction of the Frankfurt Kitchen, the section hosts other designs for space for the preparation or preservation of food that have radically modified our way of thinking: from 1950s pvc Tupperware and the first domestic refrigerator, to the images of the “safe” energy-saving kitchens realized by the WFP for women in developing countries.

STREET. This section above all investigates the social role of food, present in the street and in the piazza/square as a generator of public life. Besides the images and videos of Gordon Matta-Clark’s performance and his restaurant in Lower Manhattan, on display in this section are photos, videos and objects of the dabbawala of Mumbai, a reconstruction of the White Limousine Yatai, the traveling street food stall designed by the Japanese firm Atelier Bow-Wow, the virtual supermarket made in Korea where all one needs to do to shop for food is use the QR code while waiting for the subway train.

CITY. Since eighteenth century architects have pursued the utopia of the perfect integration between city and agriculture. From the drawings by Ledoux to the Ferme Radieuse (Radiant Farm) by Le Corbusier, from Wright’s Broadacre to the contemporary projects of urban agriculture, on display in this section are photographs and models of cities/markets/places of encounter and integration where food is the main actor of the social quality of the “city effect.” Viewers will examine MVRDV’s MarktHal in Rotterdam and the redevelopment of the famous market of Santa Caterina in Barcelona by Miralles Tagliabue, the urban beehives of Snøhetta and the site-specific “agricivic” urban vegetable garden of Richard Ingersoll.

LANDSCAPE. Landscape, agriculture and food are an omnipresent triad in the debate on contemporary territories. Exhibited in this section are the projects that best represent the evident focus of this theme, on the one hand, images of beauty and innovation, and on the other, powerful and controversial ones: from saltworks (on display, among others, Ziv Koren’s photographic project concerning the extraction of salt in Ethiopia) to the Génoscope de Lanaud, designed by Jean Nouvel in France, to a selection of many famous designs for cellars both in Italy and abroad.

WORLD. Food is an essential theme in geopolitics and global anthropology. This section presents data on the urban and rural population, urbanization, production, malnutrition (approximately 800 million people between 2012 and 2014) and much more than that. Both the FAO and the WFP have provided data, maps and testimonial projects of this condition, which were subsequently translated by MAXXI’s curatorial staff into images, animation and info-graphs. As testimony to the presence of the UN agencies, in this section MAXXI hosts a large blue spoon, the same one that characterizes the multimedia booths at Expo Milano 2015 and that represents the theme of "Sfida Fame Zero • Uniti per un mondo sostenibile" thanks to which the United Nations seeks to launch the themes related to nutrition by bringing them to the attention of the public at large. Presented along with the data are symbolic projects such as the Norwegian Global Seed Vault and Thomas Heatherwick’s Seed Cathedral realized on the occasion of EXPO 2010 in Shanghai and the photographic exhibition of the work of Chris Terry for the WFP project Family Meals, and the European Commission, which describes spaces that are shared thanks to food.