Slow Disasters by Andrew Merritt

Slow Disasters

Andrew Merritt

‍

Slow Disasters is a long-term, modular project initiated by artist Andrew Merritt during his residency at Delfina Foundation in 2022, within the framework of the Politics of Food programme. The project uses art, food, and ecological research to restore damaged landscapes and rebuild relationships between people and place.

‍

The project unfolds in two interconnected phases:

Field Kitchens, Food for Landscapes (Phase 1), are mobile, site-responsive spaces where local communities, artists, archaeobotanists, historical ecologists, farmers, and other disciplines gather ecological memory, regenerate biodiversity through food, and prototype tools for land restoration. These kitchens function as research labs, public spaces, and community kitchens, enabling learning, collaboration, and experimentation that provide the blueprint recipes to be used in the Field Hospital stage.

Field Hospitals (Phase 2) builds on the learnings of the kitchens to create more permanent, modular infrastructures: nurseries, seed banks, and outdoor laboratories to develop materials, prototypes and tools designed to support long-term food, ecological and cultural care. These are spaces for growing, sharing, and preserving knowledge, seeds, and practices.

Both phases reappropriate the mobile infrastructure of disaster zones—field kitchens and field hospitals—transforming them into tools for food, ecology, and biocultural restoration.

The project is structured to operate across multiple countries, each adapting the framework to its own environmental and cultural context. Activities include communal meals, soil regeneration experiments, seed saving, oral history collection, and co-creation of public tools such as “cookbooks for restoration.”

Together, Field Kitchens and Field Hospitals create a network of regenerative spaces across different countries, including the UK, Mexico, South Africa and Italy. Each site is shaped by its local culture and environment, but all are connected by the same aim: to imagine new ways of living with the land, rooted in care, collaboration, and ecological responsibility.

‍