The World is A Mill

Artistic Project

Radar, Loughborough University and partners

Midlands and the North, UK, 2024-2026

The World is a Mill (TWM) is a two-year artistic project (Nov 2024 - Sep 2026) that brings together artists and communities collaborating in recipe mapping and food sharing workshops, community cooking, and peer learning. The project is commissioned by Radar, Loughborough University. Rooted in the Midlands it will move to regional towns in the UK and NI, through its partners.

We will be opening a portal to a world that sees recipes as carrier bags, and that amplifies migrant and migrating knowledge that creates conditions of regeneration. The project aims to articulate and experiment with the types of coordination and synergy needed between local, dispersed and displaced communities in climate breakdown. Alternative forms of recipe exchange, food sharing and food as cultural preservation, is a way to explore how knowledge and sensorial methodologies of growing and eating can contribute to climate action.

Worldwide, the climate and nature emergency is creating new states of existential precarity. Among fascist unrest, a cost of living crisis, war, unsustainable global supply chains, and crop failures, more people are forced to live relations filled with shifting uncertainties; lives where the meaning of home is constantly changing. How do we think, feel, and sense our way through extinction, instability and displacement to find new conceptions of life, solidarity, collectivity, and multispecies belonging? What germinates in the afterlives of hope, in the interstitial spaces between crushed dreams and a need for renewal? What will we take in our carrier bags as we move through this changing world? A wisdom of the soil is a wisdom of entanglement: no species can come into being on its own.

We shape and are shaped by plants. We co-evolve, directed by intersecting needs, desires, and appetites. We carry seeds in our bags, and are in turn carried by these seeds. They are pathways, portals through which we can establish deeper understandings of the relationships of reciprocity necessary for cultivating life, wherever we are. As we learn to grow seeds into plants – tilling, pruning, fertilising, weeding – we also learn to settle, to relate to the land and its rhythms. We tame each other.

This project follows the trajectory of the common bean, Phaseolus vulgaris. Originating in the territories of Turtle Island and Abya Yala, archeological findings indicate that the plant might have been domesticated as early as 8,000 years ago in the Andean region, and around 6,000 years ago in the central areas of the continent. Transported through colonial trade routes, P. vulgaris made its first documented appearance in Europe in 1508, cultivated as an ornamental plant in France (Rodiño and Drevon, 2004). It has, since then, spread to every landmass on Earth, becoming a crop of major economic significance, selected and bred into hundreds of distinct varieties. In the UK, the climate is seen as too cold and wet to grow P. vulgaris; nevertheless, since its introduction in the British market in the early 20th century by the U.S. American businessman Henry Heinz, the tin of baked beans has come to represent and materialise British conceptions of class, belonging, productivity, and convenience.

Examining the lifespan of the common bean, from seed to commodity, we ask – what happens when a species is separated from land and companion lifeforms, distorting the network of relations in which is it inserted? What kinds of narratives emerge when the seed enters the space of the factory, and when the need for food sovereignty is distorted into delusive conceptions of territorial and cultural purity? Here, we invoke the concept of ‘sovereign capability’ as the right of all people to define their own provisioning systems within a given boundary. Thinking about food and sovereign capability is a way to think about the deeper challenges in a climate adaptation future, such as climate migration and balancing local connections and global co-dependencies. Is food sovereignty freedom or further precarity? Can feeding ourselves be an act of inclusion, when no other place is home?