the art
table
Book nowAn evolving creative commission that explores where art and food intersect through the act of gathering around a table. Reimagined with every edition, it offers a new perspective on the rituals, ideas and cultural expressions that shape the way we eat together. This year, Zuri Camille De Souza brings the concept to life through a guided picnic.
the guided
picnic
Come over for tea?
What if a picnic could change the way you think about food? At The Art Table, Zuri Camille de Souza invites 20 guests to slow down and look beyond what is on the plate.
It starts with a deceptively simple word: radical. Once meaning “of the root”, it invites us to consider what it means to change things from the ground up. What do roots have to do with revolution? Can a recipe be radical? Ingredients and flavours can hold memories of home, migration and the places we come from. Roots can also be complicated, shaped by distance or tied to histories we might rather leave behind.
The Picnic Table becomes a meeting place for these ideas. Guided sessions bring together meditation, writing, drawing, readings and shared food, creating room for conversation to unfold at its own pace. A small library of books and zines offers further ways to explore questions of ecology, feminism, diaspora cuisines and culture.
Part picnic, part reading room, part writing workshop, the experience makes space for a different kind of gathering: one where the pleasure of being together can lead somewhere unexpected. Perhaps you’ll leave with a more radical idea of what it means to put down roots.
Zuri Camille De Souza
Growing up in Goa, in a family shaped by different regions and religious traditions, Zuri Camille de Souza encountered food as a living record of cultural exchange. It was a way of carrying home across distances, of negotiating differences and of finding common ground around a table.
Her practice spans cooking, ecology and design. After studying human ecology in the United States, she pursued projects exploring food, migration and community, including culinary projects in Palestine & work around permaculture in Greece. For Zuri, feeding people is both a creative practice and a way of understanding our place in the living world. Her work brings food out of the realm of consumption and into a larger conversation about land, identity and belonging.