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.

“As a symbol of care, how is the garden a pathway, bringing us closer to something outside of ourselves?

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

The sounds, the taking of time out in a natural setting – it is the sculpture itself. We think about what the artwork means. We think about our role as humans. Perhaps our problems feel smaller. We are attracted to the garden, much like the pollinators, except unlike the pollinators, we are more existential, unsure of our role. And so we simply sit, all of that energy buzzing inside of us.”

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

“As I was sitting in the garden this evening I was thinking about cartography. The garden is a map of attraction. It’s been designed for the pollinators and what and how they consider attractions. We have different elevations of plants, colours that relate to their vision, textures, scents. When I design a table, it’s also a cartography, a type of map. Tonight, the idea of maps related to the idea of attraction, which I didn’t think about before. I relate to the idea of being a pollinator, and with this menu, we wanted to make you (the audience) think of yourselves as pollinators, too. I think as manifesters and makers and alchemists, we are. The table has been arranged in a way where we would love for you to choose what you are first attracted to, and to maybe think about why – what it reminds you of, where you find yourself gravitating. Consider how, when you access the table, it relates to pollinators and how they access a garden.”

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?

“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, starting 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 by Robin Wall Kimmerer, which I learned quite kismet-ly was also independently acting as a kind of bible for the creators of this residency a LAS I’ve been journeying on.”

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

".... 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 **

“At first I felt intimidated by the idea of making a piece about the future of public spaces/art until I realized that the menu, the series, is already a piece of public art. Tonight we make a piece of public art (the menu) within a piece of public art (the garden). Instead of applying pressure toward making a piece about the garden, tonight I make something within the garden and in that way accomplish something new. This is a piece about care, a topic we’ve discussed 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 injustice. It simplifies that which does not ask for simplifying. It applies unnecessary standards for care. I will create a place, a universe, a menu, about CARE, NEGOTIATION OF NEEDS, SURRENDER, SUBMISSION, TRUST and above all: 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 cloths 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 for an extended amount of time. Also an act of survival. We sewed our own clothes because it was what we could afford. We could make 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 in mental institutions.

For the menu, I was thinking how the most violent moments of my life have also been the softest. Each menu item is representative of a memory holding this battle with empathy, sense of place, negotiation. I ask myself: can I create a place where this battle with care lives? What are we inviting in? What are we dismissing? I’ve also been thinking about the complications in working in the culinary arts. I’ve been revisiting the first piece of food/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 art (let alone 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 feel lost; it reminds me that if we can wade through the surplus of food art currently trending, we can find something relatable, accessible, something perhaps more real than aesthetics, something of home. Upon crafting something this evening I badly want to step away from aesthetics and toward FORMAT, STORY, AND PUBLIC, an expression of RELATIONAL ART where this evening is not the centre 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.