Ronald Kolb
Post-Exhibitionary Practice

https://www.m1-hohenlockstedt.de/en/kuratieren/m1-kuratieren-202526/forderpreise-202526/

2025/26 Advancement Award Exhibition of the Arthur Boskamp-Stiftung
Curated by Ronald Kolb

A project by Paula König, Liliana Escalhão and Johann König

Modularküche brought together artistic research, plant-based cooking and graphic design in an investigation of how food carries local histories. Developed by Paula König, Liliana Escalhão and Johann König, the project moved between central Portugal and northern Germany, tracing the relationships between regional vegetables, seasonal recipes, climatic conditions and everyday forms of knowledge.

The collaboration began after Paula König and Liliana Escalhão met during an artist residency in Portugal in 2022. Their conversations about seasonality and regional vegetable cultures gradually developed into a shared practice in which recipes, drawings and meals became equally important research tools. Johann König extended this collaboration through communication design, translating its materials into a modular visual language.

A Kitchen between Two Regions
For the exhibition at M.1, the collaborators examined foods and recipes associated with two distinct landscapes. Rather than placing Portugal and northern Germany in a simple comparison, the project followed how ingredients acquire meaning through cultivation, preparation, memory and repetition. A recipe appeared not as a fixed cultural object, but as a structure that changes when seasons, soils, kitchens and available produce change.

The project therefore approached culinary translation as a situated practice. Techniques could travel, but they had to respond to the conditions of another place. Familiar ingredients could be prepared differently, while unfamiliar combinations opened new perspectives on local produce. Food became a medium through which climatic and cultural differences could be experienced rather than merely described.

Before the exhibition opened, a sequence of shared dinners at M.1 allowed this research to unfold around the table. Cooking and eating together created a temporary social space in which recipes could be tested and stories exchanged. The kitchen functioned as both studio and meeting place, connecting aesthetic decisions to the practical work of sourcing, preparing and sharing food.

Exhibition and Publication
The exhibition on the first floor of M.1 assembled illustrations, images and spatial interventions developed through the research. It was accompanied by a bilingual German-Portuguese publication designed by Johann König. Situated between a recipe book, a calendar and a visual narrative, the publication followed a week through spring, summer, autumn and winter. Recipes, drawings and short texts made seasonality legible as both an ecological condition and an organisational principle.

The publication was not conceived simply as documentation of the exhibition. It became another modular kitchen: a format that could travel, be read, cooked from and reassembled elsewhere. In this way, the work continued beyond the exhibition space and entered domestic kitchens and other social settings.

Modularküche showed how an ordinary practice such as preparing vegetables can connect ecological research, artistic form and collective experience. Its colourful, garden-based cuisine did not illustrate sustainability from a distance. It put ecological thinking into practice through seasonal limits, translation, hospitality and the pleasures of eating together.