We should never abandon the city in favour of a virgin territory.
— Manifesto of Urban Cannibalism, 2012
Urbanibalism is the experience of the city from the perspective of ingestion and as a form of life that grows autonomously from any planned ‘city ecology’. Against superficial aesthetics such as food design and bioart, urbanibalism explores the greater metabolism of the city and the historical conflicts of the living matter at the basis of any culinary art. Urbanibalism is a new sensibility toward metropolitan natureculture, expanding upon the edibility of the city — the city as a spontaneous convivium.
Living in Amsterdam and Berlin, Wietske Maas and Matteo Pasquinelli coined the term Urbanibalism and established the eponymous project in early 2007 exploring the Umwelten of different cities and organising convivia also in Utrecht, Brussels, Melbourne and Istanbul. The project and this online archive are organised in 3 sections: Convivia, Umwelten and References.
• Convivia are the final conversation and composition of the Umwelten that have been discovered, explored, cooked and ingested. A communal feast with an always different community of urban gastronomers or a new trajectory connecting different Umwelten and unveiling the common fabric of any metropolis, landscape and metabolism.
• Umwelt is the world as seen and experienced from the subjective point of view of a singular form of life. An urban weed, an old recipe, a still life found in a museum: each of them projects its own environment. Art begins with the animal that carves out a territory and constructs a house, Deleuze and Guattari once noticed.
• Texts & References section collects books of botany, old herbaria and bestiaria, newspaper articles and philosophical novels, art exhibitions and city cartographies that particularly inspired us.
Further readings
→ Wietske Maas & Matteo Pasquinelli, “Urbanibalism“, glossary entry in: Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova (eds) Posthuman Glossary. London: Bloomsbury, 2018. [pdf]
→ Wietske Maas & Matteo Pasquinelli, “The City Devouring Itself: Urbanibalism in Times of World Wars, Insurgent Communes and Biopolitical Sieges”, in: Open #18: 2030 – War Zone Amsterdam, Rotterdam: NAi, 2009. [pdf]
→ Wietske Maas & Matteo Pasquinelli, “Manifesto of Urban Cannibalism”, Architectural Review Asia Pacific, Melbourne, 2013. New reissues: DIS magazine, New York, October 2014. ar/ge kunst gallery, Bolzano, 2020. [pdf]
What is urbanibalism not?
Urbanibalism is not like most other isms which are often extreme positions disconnected from the larger scheme of things (veganism, survivalism, protectionism, to name a few.) It’s rather a playful ism between urbanism and ‘cannibalism’ that seeks the generous edible surplus of the whole urban habitat. Urbanibalism shares dispositions and sometimes overlaps with existing art practices and culinary cultures. In recent years, however, a lot of new buzzwords and fashionable concepts have appeared, especially to do with food and/or art and/or the city: food design, localvore, bioart, molecular cuisine, etc. We feel that these specialised concepts and disciplines either artificialise, abstractify or negate the living matter that is the basis of any (culinary) art.