The international symposium “FoodPrint” was organized by Maria Papadimitriou and Phoebe Giannisi over a ten-day period in the Monastery of St. Nicholas in the region of Pau, South Pelion. It resulted in a multicultural gathering where residents stayed together with artists, art theorists, architects, and teachers and students from the Department of Architecture at the University of Thessaly.

The objective of the symposium was to enquire into the eating habits of the residents of Pelion. The anthropological practices – which took food consumption as data – were linked to the uniqueness of the landscape: the biodiversity made possible by coastal, lowland and mountain crops, as well as animal husbandry and fishing.

Participants collaborated with residents and recorded all of the procedures related to culinary culture: cultivation, farming and fishing practices, the harvesting and processing of edible raw materials, as well as the storage, production, and consumption of food. The symposium concluded with a pastoral party on a table designed and built by Zissis Kotionis using hay bales and marble slabs. 

These procedures and practices were traced as foo(d/t)prints of what we call “nourishment,” comprised of the inseparable aspects of culture and production of collectivities in the same way that a common meal constitutes the founding condition of any symbiosis.

http://www.arch.uth.gr/en/activities/263