Jeppe Kalnæs: Common Waste, Common Resource

Jeppe Kalnæs is a founding member of the transdisciplinary arts and science-collective TUSCA7. With roots in Technische Universität Berlin, they combine methods from architecture, natural sciences, arts and critical journalism as they push towards a stronger sense of solidarity and kinship between terrestrials of all kinds. Their work circles around compost as both a substance that challenges our concepts of life and death and sustainable, communal practice that could lead the way into a future with less emphasis on growing businesses and more on growing veggies.

Jeppe will give a lecture on how TUSCA7 approaches topics such as waste, life and the urban food chain and present their most recent project, setting up the so-called “Compost Canteen”, a restaurant for microbes, at the Danish 7-day music festival Roskilde.

The event will take place in the community garden Kuchyňka, Květinářská, Prague 8 (http://www.kzkuchynka.cz). It will be preceded by a tour of the Metabolic Rift exhibition at VI PER Gallery from 17:00, from where we will move on to the lecture.

The event is part of an international symposium You Must Relax!, which is held in cooperation with three organizations, which focus on current issues of the contemporary city and our existence in it – VI PER, Prague – 4AM/Fórum pro architekturu a média, Brno (https://forum4am.cz) – MAGAZIN, Wien (https://architektur-im-magazin.at).
Three days, three cities and one topic experienced and discussed from three different points of view. Work, recreation, regeneration, relaxation – a complex system with a complex history intertwined with consumption, extraction and more. In the garden, in the gallery, on the train, by the water, in the city – the event is conceived as a journey through three cities – beginning in Prague (7 July 2023), continuing in Brno (8 July 2023) and ending in Vienna (9 July 2023). You can look forward to lectures, performance, discussions, listening session, fire, exhibition visits, collective sleepover and much more.

The programme is realized thanks to the financial support of the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic, European union, Czech recovery plan, Bundesministerium für Kunst, Kultur, öffentlichen Dienst und Sport, Stadt Wien, Kammer der Ziviltechniker:innen, Architekt:innen und Ingenieurkonsulent:innen für Wien, Niederösterreich, Burgenland.