Open Lecture with Julia von Mende
On Monday, May 16, between 17:00 and 18:30, the second Open Lecture of the Spring Semester 2022 will take place. Our Guest, Julia von Mende from Bauhaus Universität Weimar will present her recent project. The title of the presentation is "On the Spatialization of Contemporary Eating Practices”. Following the presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions and discuss.
The Open Lecture will take place in a hybrid format, on campus at Salzufer 6, 10587 Berlin in Studio 2, and via Zoom.
Below are the details for joining via ZOOM.
Click here to join the Zoom Meeting.
Students across all disciplines are invited to participate in an interdisciplinary exchange. Be inspired and get to know new perspectives!
About the project: "On the Spatialization of Contemporary Eating Practices"
By Julia von Mende
In everyday lives of urban dwellers in Germany’s bigger cities, cooking at home has become increasingly uncommon, while the supply of spatio-temporal flexible fast food outlets, delivery services and the like are growing. So, what is going on in the kitchen, if less and less meals are being cooked and eaten there, whereas at the same time there is hardly a place to be found where people do not consume food and/or beverages? Eating and food preparation have been explored from multidisciplinary perspectives.
However, little is known about their everyday spatial circumstances. Hence, the study seeks to fill this research gap by looking at food practices and their spatial (dis)orders in the urban context of German cities. Within the interdisciplinary field of architecture and the social and cultural sciences, the complexity of the research object is met by a combination of field research, interviews and analytical drawings. Explorations in kitchens in private households in Berlin lead to places out of home, such as traffic junctions, office kitchenettes, rental kitchens and gastronomic venues.
Along the concept of spatialization, spatio-temporal usage patterns, the meaning of spaces and their creation as well as modifications in processual appropriation are investigated. Transitory practices, the effectiveness of existing spatial structures and material objects in the kitchen at home and elsewhere, spatial reallocations and blurred boundaries between the private household and the city as well as the inversion of the private and public spheres are described as phenomena of spatialization of contemporary eating practices. These phenomena are interpreted against the background of historical excursus and the present discourse in social sciences. In particular Hartmut Rosa's theory of "social acceleration" serves to identify the underlying determinants. The study provides insights into the current spatial contexts of urban everyday eating practices and shows their interconnectedness with all areas of everyday life.
About Julia von Mende
Julia von Mende is an architectural theorist and has been a research associate (postdoc) at the Institute for European Urban Studies since 2020. Her research interests lie in the interdisciplinary investigation of spatial structures and interrelationships of everyday practices such as eating and domestic life.
In her dissertation project, which she conducted during her research work at the Department for Building Typologies at RWTH Aachen University (2017-2020), she investigated the spatialization of contemporary eating practices. Point of departure for this project was a scientific assistance in the interdisciplinary project "The Anthropocene Kitchen" at the Cluster of Excellence Image Knowledge Design (DFG-funded) at the Humboldt University of Berlin (2013-2016). She has collected teaching experience in architecture and design at the UdK Berlin, the TU Dresden, the Ecole d'Architecture de Paris-Belleville, the HS Sachsen-Anhalt Dessau and the Kunsthochschule Weißensee.