Júlia Casamitjana
Architect and urban planner by training, Júlia have created with a team a network of 100 farmers and ranchers who, from respect and delicacy, produce healthy and organic food. She meets with the chefs in Paris every Friday to design the menu according to that the producers propose, also depending on the trucks, the weather, the state of the field, the mood of the animals and the needs of each farm or cooperative. Studying these edible circuits and their (dis)connections is her path to understand our ways of living. With her boyfriend, they have bought a tiny farm in the Basque Country to build a craft and agriculture project.
How do you define your project?
I seek to enhance the artisanal, creative, delicate work of the peasant and sublimate the beauty of the rural world. Peasants have been sidelined, mocked and overtaxed for centuries by a ruling urban elite who ignores the complexity and sophistication of the skills needed to produce food. Most of the plants in our gardens today, trees in our orchards, sheep, cows and goats in pastures have been domesticated during the Neolithic, before civilisation itself. Different regions of the world have long had their own specific mode of subsistence, developed over the millennia by people who settled there and learned where certain types of plants grow, learned to recognise the smallest animals, even microscopic bacteria needed for the fermentation of alcohol, chocolate or cheese. From the steep slopes of the jungle in Southwest China to the arid Sahara desert, in a direct and respectful relationship to the land, a spirit of what it means to be here has been developed.
What are the origins of your creation?
Architect and urban planner by training, I have always tried to understand how one lives somewhere. How we live together in the same place with our cultural, religious and morphological differences. I understood that the food - cooking, buying, eating, producing, distributing - materialises the complex connections with the things and the people that surround us. Food is an open language that connects us with other people, even unknown ones: since the beginning of civilisation, social gatherings, rituals or popular celebrations are accompanied by something to eat and share. Food allows us to inhabit a place, a table has the power to transform any location into a secular, intimate and domestic environment. Food connects us to the history of a territory, its specificity and its culture. This history in particular is the origin of my work as it contains a systemic understanding of our relationship to natural resources. I’m interested in eating as a political gesture : a gesture that has the power to disrupt a production system that today exploits the earth, people, animals, and denies climate change.
Reconciliation with the farming world allows a revival of consciousness, a support for biological and cultural diversity, a return to a lost human scale.
How do you contribute to shape the future?
I spent a few years rubbing shoulders with peasants who do not work as they were told to do and who therefore had to invent their own know-how and techniques. They taught me that one of the great strengths of this ecological intelligence is that it does not come from an analytical, exhaustive approach, but rather from a holistic, intuitive, poetic and sensitive knowledge. I work with bee keepers, cheese makers, breeders and winegrowers to market their products and connect them with Parisian chefs. In parallel, I write on the elegance of their work. Reconciliation with the farming world allows a revival of consciousness, a support for biological and cultural diversity, a return to a lost human scale. In architecture, door handles and the height of windows have always been built to match a human scale. In contrast, the food industry is global and abstract. This loss of scale marks the strange condition of our modernity. We rarely have the opportunity to experience the discrepancy and excess that our lifestyles induce. To me, both the food system and the construction of our cities constitute a reasonable and sustainable scale to engage with - a scale of responsibility.
I’m interested in eating as a political gesture : a gesture that has the power to disrupt a production system that today exploits the earth, people, animals, and denies climate change.
Who is your biggest Muse?
I’m very inspired by the bee. She embodies perfectly the values of peasantry : she works for the common good, she ensures the future of her community and of all of us. Poetic and political, she represents the intelligence of the living and the ability to work with it and not against it. How to acquire this ecological intelligence - how to build it - these are essential questions to me. The food industry has achieved the abomination that is the negation of our belonging to nature, and industrial agriculture is symptomatic of this utilitarian relationship to the world. Reducing our reality only to market value has prevented us from developing a political and moral thought on the environment. Like the bee that pollinates, the urgency of ecology seems to me to lie in our ability to reconnect to the living that surrounds us. Take root in intimacy and wilderness to rethink our political systems.
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