Throughout the summer of 2024, Chelsea Turowsky explored the manifold characteristics of Pollinator Pathmaker – from blooming patterns to changing colour pallets, from growth cycles of plants to the pollinators that feed on them. In this process, she was supported by the curatorial team of LAS Art Foundation, scientists from the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin and gardening professionals from the Königliche Gartenakademie in Berlin-Dahlem. Based on her observations, Chelsea created four experimental tasting menus corresponding to four moments manifested in the artwork. The menus were presented as part of the 2024 Pollinator Pathmaker: Summer Programme. This website offers insight into Chelsea’s process, from written reflections and visual archives to menus as poems.

“On preparing to meet you, a new diary.

As a symbol of care, how might the garden take on the role of pathway, escalating us closer to something outside of ourselves?

This garden was not constructed for humans but I have watched the way we react to it.I am sitting here. I am reminded of Sophie Calle’s Voir la mer (2011). Something happens to us when we sit in the garden.

The sounds (city, buzzing, bee), the feeling of pause – these inform the sculpture. We consider what the artwork means, what we feel. We consider our role as humans. Perhaps our problems shrink. We are attracted to the garden, mirroring pollinators, except unlike them, we are more existential, unsure of our roles. And so we simply sit, all of that energy buzzing inside of us.

Seasons, sight, invasion. A spilling over, a reaching. Soil. Garlic.

The project isn’t innocent, there are barriers.

How to record time? The role of water?”

Blackberry
Dressing for you, imagining what or who you might resemble

Garlic, asparagus
As a symbol of: care, thirst, trust, surrender, time

Endive, zucchini, strawberry, habanero
I never told you that- how could you have known?

Corn, daikon, sakura
Assume you are understood

King oyster, poblano
What matters is that working through it deeply satisfies the soul

Apricot, lavender
The closest, the closest

Consider attraction. Is it beauty, or is it taste?

“As I was sitting in the garden this evening I was contemplating cartography.

The garden is a botanical map of attraction. Its variance in elevation, color, texture, scent… the garden is in a constant conversation with attraction and has been designed at its core to attract.

Do insects experience aesthetic pleasure?

A table’s design is also a cartography, a type of map.

The table has been arranged. We encourage you to choose the edible item that you are first attracted to, and to consider what its traits remind you of, where you find yourself gravitating. Consider how, when accessing the table, you yourself are also pollinator. The table mimics the garden.

The majority of bees are generalists. Attracted to many species, they do not quickly go hungry. Specialist bees, in contrast, have a distinct relationship with their flower, a relationship beyond pollination. The species have developed a co-evolution. Their harmony or fall reflects the larger health of the ecosystem.

As I watch lavender dominate this garden in summer I am at the same time walking paths along the ocean in California every so often plucking one thread of purple and placing it in a pocket for some other time. Lavender is an analgesic, it grows within me.

A shot of vinegar

To enter the space

Give them a question when they arrive

Give them something

In early April I forage hundreds of cherry blossoms. I clean them for hours at home on a Sunday, later soaking them in vinegar, then burying them in salt. I leave them to soak up that salt while out of Berlin for one week and return to a hatching of the preservation of time.

As a group, the team and I discuss the intentional inclusion of honey over the course of several weeks.“

I knew you without knowing you

Sakura vinegar
Distilled spring cherry blossoms in vinegar and salt; the pollinated result
A kind of lingering in the mouth

Masa, mole, salsa verde
Take one; it lingers

Rice cracker, ripe fig torn with the hands
King oyster, chanterelle, early nasturtium
Celery aguachile, lemongrass, sweet potato, heirloom bean
Blackberry shrub
Who do you gravitate toward? What moves you?
Find your soulmate flower.

Lavender, three honeys:
I can’t stop thinking, what would this look like with our eyes closed?
Can’t you stay a bit longer?

The earth listens. What do you say?

“I was cooking this menu and I saw only vegetables. No tricks, no hiding, it was all very honest. And I was thinking how rewarding it is to be honest. How any type of dreams or change begin with honesty, beginning with ourselves.

Years ago a close friend took me to a bookshop in Brooklyn and said ‘Chelsea, I need to give you this book. You can’t have my copy because I need it, but I feel you need it too. Here, this is for you.’ He had done the same thing a decade earlier with Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, and I had done the same thing then: I could not access the book until I had prepared myself to be consumed by it.

This has happened with Braiding Sweetgrass, which I learned quite kismet-ly was also independently acting as a kind of bible for the creators of this residency.

A few things I consider while cooking your vegetables today

A. Heritage myths

Visuals: My mother weeping allium petals shortly before her death, humans with ginkgo leaves for hands, my grandmother’s mother feeding her children raw potatoes as they flee Frankfurt, that great grandmother is said to have become a spider, so I cannot kill spiders. My grandmother says she was once a gull, her brother laughs and says no, she was a sparrow. Her home is covered with oil paintings of birds.

B. My own capacity

Some days are meant for hiding behind complicated answers; some days are meant for vegetables. To what degree are we willing to share ourselves? How much do we keep? How much do we give? How much of listening is exchange and how much of it is magic? 'That is the fundamental nature of gifts: they move.'

C. Bodies

My neighbor carrying a dark green melon on the summer street
Why run from tenderness?
It hurt everywhere to love you
If broth is trust, survival is garden

D. Garden, mother, meadow

Can I cut this cord?
How much about this is cyclical?
After we leave, what are we left with? “

".... To move away from seeing the river as a resource – 'what do we want from the river?' – and towards a place where it was possible to ask, “what do we want for the river, and how do we get there with the river? .... This is a subset of a larger question about interspecies relationships that asks not 'how are you like me?' but 'what is it like to be you?'... While translation is a necessary and often generative practice, the desire to “give voice” to the needs and desires of other beings masks a lingering inability to listen. The flower hears the bee, and so must we, if we are to speak with it, rather than over it. " *

OF THE EARTH
cascabel, ancho, mulato, onion, tomato
chickpea, zucchini blossom, corn

THE GIFT OF STRAWBERRIES
tamari, peanut, lime, spring onion, cucumber, habanero, strawberry

ROOT DANCE
root vegetables in conversation
salt, potato, carrot, radish
+ + + coconut green tea

TEETH
cherry, chocolate, trust **

This is the place where I stop being me and start being you.
This is the place where I stop being you and start being me.

“What was at first intimidating (how to make a piece about the future of public art?) lessened with the realizing that we have already been making it. Tonight we make a piece of public art (the menu) within a piece of public art (the garden). This is a piece about care, a concept we’ve been studying since May, the garden itself a representation of care and its contradictions. I suffer from empathy. I have spent my adulthood unlearning the conviction that my empathy, my care, might save you, when in fact this conviction, this reduction of care to 'giving' or 'fixing' does the act of care an injustice. It simplifies that which does not ask for simplifying. It applies unnecessary standards toward care.

Here I have created a place, a universe, a menu, about care, negotiation of needs, surrender, submission, trust and most significantly: the SOFT VIOLENCE interwoven within empathy. This is the place where my empathy lives. This is the place where I stop being me and start being you. This is the place where I stop being you and start being me.

And so I have hand-stitched the table cloth directly onto 9 which has taken over 20 hours. The piece began when I began the first table. The act of stitching, one of care, one which can be violent on the body if overworked. It is also an act of survival. We sewed our own clothes because it was what we could afford. We made something out of nothing. The fabric chosen is related to my heritage. The women in my family sleep in silk. It is our lineage. My mother only wore denim, likely died in it. I wrap the tables in white as though covering the furniture of an abandoned house, covering mirrors in mourning, stitching the fabric together, the legs like arms in a jacket meant to restrain those who cannot be trusted.

In regards to the menu, I can’t stop thinking how the most violent moments of my life have also been the softest. Each menu item is representative of a memory holding my battle with empathy, sense of place, and negotiation. I ask myself: Can I create a place where this struggle lives? Where does it live within all of us? What are we inviting in? What are we dismissing?

I’ve also been thinking about the complications of working in the culinary arts. I’ve been revisiting the first piece of food as art I experienced. Some 15 years ago at the Museum of Modern Art, Rirkrit Tiravanija was making Thai curry. I had never considered food in the museum context before. Growing up in my family’s restaurant, food was an act of survival, not of poetry. I think of this piece each time I can’t find my heartbeat at work. Upon crafting something this evening I eagerly step away from aesthetics and toward format, story, and public: an expression of RELATIONAL ART where this evening is not the center but rather a CATALYST.”

A COLD MILK, THE LAST OF THE CACAO FROM BAHIA
plant based chocolate milk

BREAD AFTER A BUS RIDE IN THE MOST ISOLATED PART OF THE WORLD
` ` ` `
NANCY CUTTING ONIONS
caramelized onion, jasmine rice

WINE AND TOMATO LEATHER
(please note the alcohol has been removed)

CELERY JUICE
` ` ` `
A SOFT VIOLENCE
candy on silver skewers, plum

Food was integral to the concept of the Pollinator Pathmaker: Summer Programme because our metabolism plays a decisive role in understanding the world we inhabit; the act of eating is an embodied interaction with the environments that sustain us. Yet, food is also an artistic medium, translating knowledge around preparation techniques, combinations of flavours, textures and nutritional qualities into compositions that address all senses. Moreover, Chelsea’s invaluable contribution revealed that a dish as a layered blend of synergizing elements and the living artwork Pollinator Pathmaker share a common trait: the importance of time. Planting, growth, and harvest all require patience and careful tending before the elements can be gathered on the table, revealing their essence in a fleeting moment of consumption.