NTU CCA Ideas Fest III

NTU CCA Ideas Fest is a platform to catalyse critical exchange of ideas and encourage thinking “out of the box”. It links the artistic and academic communities with grassroots and self-organised initiatives and small-scale entrepreneurship. Following the global call for an ecological turn in art, architecture, and design, NTU CCA Ideas Fest III presents projects that engage, investigate, and aim to ensure food security on a healthy planet. The vitality of food poses a wide-ranging set of questions and problems when confronted with nature’s diminishing capacity to nourish life as a result of harmful anthropocentric activity. Such challenges demand that we rethink our modes of production and consumption.

This third edition of Ideas Fest draws relational links to improve the understanding of sustainable food systems and their urgencies, opening a pathway towards actionable steps to ensure food security. Current food practices are threatening both people and planet; more nourishing and sustainable ways of eating and producing need to be developed. This need to transform our societies towards socio-ecological sustainability is clear, but many proposals lack the concrete economic and political scaffolding necessary to make their implementation feasible.

The global food system encompasses all economic sectors, and understanding its components is essential for developing and executing effective measures to strengthen its sustainability. IdeasFest III looks into how various technologies affect (traditional) food practices and culinary techniques, and which of these are valued. Food security hinges on sustainable food systems which are based on subsystems, including farming, waste management, and supply infrastructures, which in turn interact with trade, energy, and health systems.