Paulina Sycha

Other Market/Campi Aperti
(How to set up a market stall) Thesis Research Publication
Master Interior Architecture: Research + Design
Piet Zwart Institute

The research project is focused on the spatial politics of food within Europe, namely the standardizing mechanisms that are growth and hyperproduction oriented. The publication advocates for an emancipatory post-capitalist food culture through the case of an independent subversive food association in Italy, Campi Aperti. Diary-like notes about the personal experiences as a vendor at a weekly market form the framework for the multi-scalar research, which explores the question of what food enters into the city every day. The thesis pays attention to the oppressive administrative and regulatory frameworks that condition not only the production but also circulation of food, through which the space of the weekly market is understood as political. The writing creates links between food and embodied experiences at food markets, to the broader network of power relations that control or condition them. For Campi Aperti, setting up their market stalls in Bologna, often without a market licence, is an act of protest. The space of the weekly market is studied as a site for materialization of these broader networks of forces, and the work of setting up a stall as a site for thinking about both spatial and food justice.