In order to advance food systems in the new seasons of the climate crisis, CLIMAVORE x Jameel at RCA launched the 2024 Food Action Awards. A call open to international practitioners, collectives and researchers in the areas of architecture, visual arts, food studies, farming, environmental humanities or any other related discipline. The aim is to support infrastructural prototypes, field trials, landworkers solidarity networks, BIPOC farming initiatives, queer ecologies or microclimatic environments among other strategies towards building alternative diets that benefit human and nonhuman nourishing.
After receiving almost 100 applications in its inaugural edition, it was worth highlighting how the different projects identified new seasons of the climate crisis and their manifestation in other geographies facing similar conditions along the broken food chain. Proposals included research into legacies of extractivism and possible reparative futures to address how we eat as humans change the climate. Congratulations to the following recipients:
Yara Dowani, Om Sleiman Farm, (Research Action Award - £25,000) for her project Regeneration Towards Liberation, which tackles a season of drought by testing syntropic farming as a regenerative method for food production in Palestine. The award will enable Om Sleiman Farm to expand its work with women and food collectives on the ground that can reach similar geographies facing the challenges of water exploitation, settler colonialism and drought across the Mediterranean and beyond.
Mingxin Li (Emerging Practice Award - £15,000) for recent RCA graduates for the project Golden Butter, Golden Motherland, which looks into ways to address the disappearance of the yak herding wetlands in Tibet. The project aims to reactivate ancestral food and pastoralist knowledge between generations, to form new networks that can support ongoing environmental crises.
The jury also gave the following six Honourable Mentions to commend the work of:
Dharmendra Prasad & Pujita Guha (Harvest School & Hosting Lands)
Alys Fowler
Tizintizwa Collective
Yoshiharu Tsukamoto Lab
Qanat
Cao Minghao & Chen Jianjun
The 2024 Food Action Award jury was chaired by Danielle Burrows (CLIMAVORE x Jameel at RCA) and consisted of: Cooking Sections, Cléa Daridan (Head of Arts and Culture, Community Jameel), Christine Eyene (eye.on.art), Rahul Gudipudi (Senior Curator, CARA), Adrian Lahoud (Dean, School of Architecture, RCA), Abby Rose (Farmerama Radio), and Paulo Tavares (autônoma / FAU, Universidade de Brasília).