Wanted: Living Garden Snails for Sidewalk Snail Farm
Wanted: Living Garden Snails for sidewalk snail farm and dinner as part of Mediamatic’s exhibition Noord,opening 10 September 2010.
Calling all Amsterdam North avid gardeners! Or anyone who regularly come across the slow-slugging lettuce-lounging gastropods. I am trying to collect many snails (a few thousand) of the edible kind — Segrijnslak (Cornu aspersum): http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segrijnslak also known as Helix aspersa.
This is the very common garden snail and is a smaller variant of the Burgundy snail, the Helix pomatia (NB: the Burgundy snail is protected and can not be collected in the Netherlands dead or alive).
The snails will be kept and purified in a temporary snail farm in the large vitrines of the former ABN Amro bank along the Vijzelstraat, Amsterdam
I will be asking volkstuinholders and schoolgardens for their snails, but every snail helps.
The snails will be kept and fed very well on a luscious green diet of herbs that are sourced from the snails’ own local food web.
In early October all snails will be cooked with restaurant chef and eaten as part of a convivium we’ll be preparing called ‘De Maag als Kompas’ in the atmospheric ruins of a shelled building in Amsterdam North. The meal will be a special meal as the archetypal dish of the waterlands of North: all the other ingredients on the menu are collected along a charted route in Amsterdam North (honey, rowanberries, winterpotato, geese o.a.).
Please do let me know by email if you can hunt or contribute any snails. Anyone able to contribute snails gets a free ticket to the exhibition opening this Friday
Yours slowly,
Wietske
wietske@urbanibalism.net
