Den goda maten

Den goda maten (The Benevolent Food) is a multi-year inquiry into art, environment, and food hosted by Kin Museum of Contemporary Art in collaboration with the Food Art Research Network.

Ten artists, researchers and curators from different parts of the planet will gather in Giron/Kiruna to kick off Den goda maten in August 2025. The inquiry will evolve over the coming years, through commissions, screenings, events and publications with invited artists including Åsa Sonjasdotter, Cooking Sections, Elia Nurvista, Fernando García-Dory and INLAND, Keg de Souza, Kultivator, Myvillages, Olga Tsaplya Egorova, Natalia Shapkina, Victoria Harnesk and curators Madeleine Collie and Maria Lind. Den goda maten is part of Kin’s multiyear enquiry The Critical Zone.

Food nourishes and beyond daily sustenance, it brings us joy, offers connection and maintains human labours. It is deeply connected to our sense of self and identity. But there are also darker sides to food, feeding and eating: in the context of intensifying violent crises in the world and accelerating climate change, questions of food security are becoming more urgent. How do our food habits affect not only our bodies but the planet too? In grappling with this question, self-sustenance and new ways of eating have come to the fore, as are indigenous and traditional forms of knowledge surrounding food. They are recognised as crucial to past, present and future food sovereignty.

The Swedish word ‘god’ means both delicious and good; in translating it as ‘benevolent’, we draw attention to the interdependent relationships between bodies and land in the cultivation of food. At the same time benevolence suggests something darker, because something that is offered can just as freely be taken away. To speak of food as a benevolent gesture is to ask; how do we recognise and participate in reciprocal actions towards places, people and more-than-human lives that sustain us often over great distances?

Join us at Kin on Saturday 30 August, 13:00

Hear short presentations by each of the participating artists as part of Den Goda Maten followed by a screening of Cultivating Abundance by Åsa Sonjasdotter

About the film: Cultivating Abundance (64 minutes. 2022)

With the establishment of the Swedish Seed Association in Svalöv in 1886, a modern method for plant breeding was invented that still today is in use by more or less all plant breeding industries across the globe.The film departs by a series of restored photographs from the very first plant breeding experiments in Svalöv. It follows plant breeder Hans Larsson and the association Allkorn’s work to re-cultivate those grains of traditional farmer-bred varieties that were abandoned with the introduction of modern farming.

The film opens for reflection on the consequences this shift in method would come to have for human and more-than-human relations. How can the cultivated relations, that have become so vital to humans, be understood?

More information about the event here

Image 1: ”Tell it to the field that she wants to be a meadow,” village communal garden at Kultivator, 2024.
Photo: Kultivator
Image 2: Natalya & Tsaplya. Garden for All/ Dacha Biennial for Children and Amateur Gardeners, curated by Elena Zagoskina, Elena Markitantova, and Natalia Shapkina in partnership with the School of Engaged Art by the Chto Delat collective, 2023.
Photo: Rodion Ataulin