Making the Best of It Dandelion Logo. Image: Marina Zurkow
Making the Best of It Dandelion Flag. Photo: Marina Zurkow
Join us in a ritual festivity that invites you to become more dandelion. From trans-species oration to cow eulogies to intimate ocean tributes, this is the party of Making the Best of It, a communal service compressed into the space of a toast – to how all of us are making the best of it, now and in the future.
Making the Best of It is a series of regionally site-specific food and art installations and community meals that feature a climate-change enabled (and often unwanted) edible species. Participants engage in tastings and conversation about the risks of climate chaos, our business-as-usual food system, ecological equity, and the short term food innovations at our disposal. In Minnesota, Making the Best of It: Dandelion invites participants to explore climate change through eating (and eating with) dandelions.
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Valentine Cadieux is an artist and scientist who works on the ways that people participate in agroecosystems. She chairs the Twin Cities Agricultural Land Trust and directs the Environmental Studies and Sustainability programs at Hamline University, where she also coordinates a food movement learning collaboration.
Marina Zurkow focuses on near-impossible nature / culture intersections, using life science, materials, and technologies to foster intimate connections between people and non-human agents. Zurkow is a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow, and has received awards from NYFA, NYSCA, the Rockefeller Foundation, and Creative Capital. She is on faculty at ITP / Tisch School of the Arts, and is represented by bitforms gallery.
Team Credits:
Sassi Libertus and all the participants in the Making the Best of It potlucks
Sarah Petersen, Aaron Marx, and Eden Rome co-developed significant parts of the MTBOI Dandelion platform; Courtney Tchida and the Cornercopia Student Organic Farm provided many delicious dandelions; Jim Bovino and Topos Fermentation collaborated on concepts and beverages.
Thanks also to Hamline students in the course, “Feeding a Crowd: Youth and Elders Civil Rights Work in the Food Movement”