Mapping Capsicum Ecologies
Exhibition proposal for the 2023 Venice Biennale of Architecture
with Fuzzy Earth

The exhibition invites the public to explore the entangled historical, social, and architectural relationships within greenhouse cultivation practices. Your guide and host will be a unique crop, the Capsicum plant, otherwise known as the iconic “cecei paprika” in Hungary. A site-specific carpet stretching through the pavilion and a soundscape assist your journey. The carpet creates a narrative space that draws out the – natural, technological, or material – kins of the Capsicum plant and highlights their dynamics as well as their changing relationships with their environment, both in time and in space.

In light of the global food and climate crisis, it is crucial to focus our attention on food systems since the modes of production, distribution, and consumption of food have become one of the main challenges for the coming decades. Since the “green revolution” and the advancement of food-production technologies, an ever-growing portion of cultivation happens in partially automated greenhouse systems. These agricultural landscapes cover larger and larger parts of Europe and Hungary, still, the public understanding of them is often limited. Through this project, we invite visitors to explore the otherwise hidden, black-box-like spaces of food production.