Forista

Forista* is an experimental project using the typology of a cafe to connect guests with local-planetary soils, airs and waters through the sensory arts of sipping, munching and sniffing. 

Commissioned for the Brent Biennial 2025, where Becky is a local, connecting with edible, olfactory and tactile earthly materials becomes a method of finding a shared palette across the vibrant and diverse diaspora of the borough (which speaks 157 languages) whilst honouring the importance of conviviality, hospitality, food culture and grassroots growing in the area as forms of solidarity and resistance. The format of the cafe and the ‘coffee break’ was crafted as a moment of rest, personal-collective ritual, sensory re/attunement and delight to be rediscovered in everyday actions amidst systems that would otherwise sever and dominate our natural rhythms and our relationship to the land and each other. The curated ‘soil tasting’ menu was designed to unearth the sociality of soil and its extensive and extraordinary interspecies, inter-elemental connections; to taste geographies and climates through flavour and mouthfeel and to invite participants to reflect on relationships to place, both healing and harming, through tactile and bodily interaction.

Where access to nature is unevenly distributed and desired in different ways attending closely to eating and tasting, whatever it is and wherever we are becomes a potent method for recognising the multivarious ways we are always-already coming into contact with planetary ecologies and its politics. Likewise, it can create a contact point for those who are tasked to take care of nature and are perhaps not accessing nature enough, making high stakes decisions about it from a distance behind the screen and ‘all in the mind’. Forista was designed as a vessel to convene and converse around the often invisiblised ‘places’ on our plate from coffee beans sourced from across the globe and roasted around-the-corner to plants picked and turned into sippable perfumes to cookies ‘composted’ from the back of our multi-cultured cupboards.

* Forest + barista of course?!

Photos by ACAVA Shoots (Jason Garcia)