Sobremesas
Installation at the XIII BIAU, The 13th Iberoamerican Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism: Climas, Lima, Peru, 2024
The 13th Ibero-American Biennial of Architecture and Urbanism (BIAU) was celebrated in Lima, Peru during December, 2024. This edition of the BIAU, “CLIMAS: Acciones para el Buen Vivir” was curated by a Lima-Madrid based team led by Gary Leggett, Jose Luis Villanueva, Luis Rodriguez Rivero, Elizabeth Añaños, Maria Arquero, Emilio Ontiveros. The curatorial project included a diverse collection of talks, workshops, round tables, exhibitions and seminars designed to enrich public debate around the challenges and opportunities facing architecture and urbanism in the context of an ongoing climate emergency in the Global South, that is shaping discourse and creating opportunities for community engagement. Building on this idea, this edition spotlights the work of initiatives led by community organizations such as La Red de Ollas Comunes by centering events around the activities of this collective.
La Red de Ollas Comunes is a network of grass-roots community kitchens across metropolitan Lima, Peru which address issues food scarcity in vulnerable communities. These community kitchens are located in peripheral city districts which emerged as a result of waves of immigration from the Andes to the capital city in the latter half of the twentieth century. The city was unprepared urbanistically, so informal self-build settlements were established where basic services such as roads, plumbing, electricity had not been provided. These settlements are now several decades old, and have largely self-organized through activism and ground-up efforts. Ollas Comunes is a deeply community-driven project, which has had incredible success and recognition on a local and international level. Many of these community kitchens address the complete food-cycle, from urban farming and hydroponics, to cooking and feeding their neighbors in well-defined communal spaces, to composting. During the pandemic, La Red de Ollas Comunes, was a critical resource in ensuring food security throughout the lockdown.
Sobremesas is a modular table around which you share food and have a conversation, centering the act of social and intellectual exchange at the site of food driven culture. It produces a space for communal gathering that is flexible and open for appropiation. These artefacts, designed and produced by salazarsequeromedina in collaboration with Leggett & Cahuas and the BIAU Curatorial Team (Elizabeth Añaños, María Arquero, Gary Leggett, Luis Rodríguez, Emilio Ontiveros, Jose Luis Villanueva), facilitate the meeting of diverse agents and community constituents around a table. The intention of these artefacts is to shift from the traditional role of a pavilion, that has ephemeral life and use, to a more ambiguous and open-ended infrastructural element that can be repurposed after the Biennale.
During the Biennale, it was installed in the format of an infrastructural device to support central events of the XIII BIAU such as “Sobremesas: Community Resilience and Healthy Living” and “Workshop on Food Security”. Both events brought to light the key role of la Red de Ollas Comunes as a central community agent that creates a network of care within vulnerable settlements in Peru.
The re-use of the Sobremesas after the Biennale by La Red de Ollas Comunes has been central for the design, scale and assembly. After the biennale, the artefacts were donated to two localities that are part of La Red de Ollas Comunes network for community use: Centro Cultural Comedor Comunal San Martín del Once in La Balanza, and Olla Manos Milagrosas in Manchay. For this reason, the artefacts have been designed as a prototype for a versatile modular system fabricated with locally sourced Tornillo wood, that can be easily assembled and disassembled, and transported. This allows for open ended appropriation, use and layout, that can adapt to diverse events and serve La Red de Ollas Comunes’s program, including markets, festivals, food security workshops, hydroponics, composting, and outdoor dining, meetings and classrooms.
CREDITS
salazarsequeromedina with Leggett & Cahuas and the BIAU Curatorial Team (Elizabeth Añaños, María Arquero, Gary Leggett, Luis Rodríguez, Emilio Ontiveros, Jose Luis Villanueva)
