A situated transformation design research and practice project (2019–2021) in collaboration with La Foresta – Accademia di Comunità
Gemeinschaftsökonomien fermentieren is a design-as-research MA thesis project that took place between 2019 and 2021 in the Vallagarina Valley (IT), in collaboration with La Foresta – Accademia di Comunità and many local partners. The project asks:
In what forms can critically engaged designers contribute to “undisciplined” modes of eco-economic thinking and to the creation of spaces that allow for knowledge, thought, and action practices that challenge the idea of “humanity as a separate entity”? (→ Plumwood 2007) What happens when commoning, community economies, and wild fermentation are brought into dialogue and moved into the same critical space? How do these (thinking) practices productively contaminate each other — and what blind spots emerge?
Rooted in feminist and posthumanist theory, the thesis explores the intersections of community economies and commoning by developing a mobile oven on an electric cargo bike — Forno Vagabondo — as a boundary object. This “wandering oven” travels through public spaces such as parks, plazas, and overlooked urban-rural thresholds in the Vallagarina Valley to cultivate caring relations and eco-social entanglements through the baking and sharing of sourdough bread.
The mobile oven functions as a social infrastructure: it initiates low-threshold activities in public space that foster multispecies encounters and create opportunities to become affected by food-life networks. These include humans, microbes, grains, infrastructures, and environments that collectively enable the making and sharing of bread. Through its presence, Forno Vagabondo supports situated experiments in cohabitation, conviviality, and fermentation.
The activities around the oven deliberately question dominant aesthetics of bread (e.g. white, industrial yeast bread) by inviting a collective and open exploration of ingredients, forms, and color combinations. In doing so, participants slowly discover new textures, flavors, and possibilities — while reflecting on the changes needed to continue enjoying these aromas and tastes in the future. The oven becomes a platform to activate transformative processes toward more solidaristic and just eco-economic futures.
The thesis documents both the design process of Forno Vagabondo and its multiple formats in practice, through the lens of community economies. It reflects on how theory and practice, more-than-human encounters, and collaborative making come together to imagine and enact new forms of caring economies.
The project was developed in collaboration with La Foresta, Brave New Alps, Multiverso, Italia-Nicaragua, Portobeseno, and Goever Cereali del Trentino, and received initial support from the Fondazione Trentina per il Volontariato Sociale.
