When Kirsha Kaechele of Hobart’s Museum of Old and New Art appeared on the front cover of the new Australian Financial Review magazine Fin! looking like she’d just stepped out of a spacecraft, dressed in a glamourous and exotic outfit, I wondered what had taken the mainstream media so long to bump her up to the cover.
- Kirsha will be at Tomorrowland – the future of green buildings and green cities
Certainly there’s enough articles written about Kaechele’s wild ideas – ideas that aim to generate environmental and social outcomes that absolutely challenge standard thinking, to the point of shock at times. And sure, she’s married to David Walsh, who re-invented the meaning of Tasmania, or at least its cultural brand when he opened the outrageous Mona in 2011, but this is the conservative and, financially-fixated part of the media. And suddenly they wanted to know a heap about Kaechele.
What you read in articles and see on social media is intriguing enough.
Over the past few years, I could not help but be bemused by the videos including one spoof featuring US navy seals (she’s American) to liberate and stop salmon farming in Macquarie Harbour in Tasmania. The publicity infuriated the Tassie aquaculture industries, of course, who are keen to say salmon farming has been reformed and endorsed by the greenies. But I’d been on a boat trip to view the fish farms firsthand and even without any particular scientific briefing it was clear that the fin-to-fin crowding is a disgusting way to treat a living creature. And that’s before someone explains the animal products that are fed to the fish and the chemicals to make them glow red in the dark. There goes the smoked salmon indulgence.
Among the entertaining clips online, there’s a pantomime sketch of a skinny dipping Kaechele, mid-winter, where she hilariously takes off multiple layers before plunging into the icy Hobart waters to raise money for her 24 Carrot Gardens program that brings kitchen gardens and healthy cooking to kids in schools in some of Tassie’s most “underserved areas” as she likes to put it. She’s these days joined by an annual Ladies Who Jump event (who stoke their resolve with a “lot of champagne”) in fundraising that’s now well past the $200,000 target.
There was also the work she did in New Orleans with communities struggling after Hurricane Katrina to see if she could move the dial to something different.
When I went to Hobart to meet Kaechele and see if she was up for a gig at our Tomorrowland event on 1 December in Sydney, she’d just come back from a cooking class she’d been giving for the expansion of the 24 Carrot program to secondary schools.
We met for lunch. The venue was an amazing Japanese place in an interesting part of Hobart. She was late, but well worth waiting for. It was like a movie star had just walked in – certainly someone from another level. Cool, sophisticated, drop dead gorgeous, perfectly coiffed and attired, with a demeanour that was equally warm, sophisticated and funny. Oh, and whip smart.
When you delve further into her background, the higher order thinking becomes clear.
There’s the New Orleans gig of a long outdoor street dinner for 240 people in her neighbourhood that she curated for the Andy Warhol Foundation, whose elites she defied by inviting local residents to dine at the tables or work the kitchens – their choice.
Some of the foundation members sat in a bus in protest. Others channelled their patron’s spirit and joined in – the best part, she recalls, was the Swiss banker deep in conversation with a local gangster, her neighbour.
In an official interview on the Mona website, Kaechele explains her work needs to be both aspirational and glamourous. Absolutely no dreary worthy-laden morality tales here. Nor the following of class conventions.
“They didn’t like the class mash-up”, she tells the Mona interviewer about the Warhol event.
“But that was part of what I was trying to achieve. When I first moved [to the St Roch neighbourhood of New Orleans’ 8th Ward] and started growing vegetables with the kids, my foundation, Life is Art, was very small. I didn’t have a bus or a driver. I’m illegally packing the kids into my car, and driving them to restaurants to sell their produce. If I’m going to spend my time doing that, I’m sorry, but I don’t want to go to a crummy restaurant.
“I figured it would be a lot nicer to go to the best restaurants in New Orleans. At the same time, it was really important to me that the kids in my neighbourhood would feel confident waltzing into these chandelier-laden places, befriending the chefs, feeling confident with the wait staff, and being able to say, ‘I’ve got a product that’s better than your normal restaurant supplier. It’s organic. It was picked 20 minutes ago.’ So while I’m enjoying a nice atmosphere with chefs I relate to, in a stratum of society that I enjoy, the kids are also breaking down their fear and the sense that they’ve been disowned by that tier of society. They walk in and become the boss. If we were going to low-end neighbourhood joints I don’t feel it would have been as successful at dissolving the social divide.”
This speaks volumes to a publication like The Fifth Estate.
The banquet of invasive species, called Eat the Problem, alongside a sumptuous book of the same name available for $277.77 takes a bit more digestion (pun may or may not be intended).
At more than 500 pages the book is a sumptuous compendium by all accounts, of how to eat or make clothes from plants such as cane toad, stinging nettle, camel, Japanese knotweed and sea urchin.
“Contributors include Marina Abramovi?, Germaine Greer, Heston Blumenthal, Mike Parr, Pablo Picasso, Laurie Anderson and Yves Klein, in the form of essays, scientific articles, recipes, art and verse. Each chapter is dedicated to a particular invasive species, including aliens and artificial intelligence. There’s also a chapter on humans, culminating in a deadly hemlock cocktail. It’s a joke, of course, but Mona jokes do tend to make one nervous,” The Guardian reported.
At the lunch, where Kaechele encourages me to eat wallaby because I lingered on the dish called Bruny Island wallaby, mistakenly thinking it was a metaphor for an interesting plant dish or somehow that island’s famous oysters served in some obscure configuration. I also discover that the feral cat I’ve read about for the banquet is also not a metaphor.
Kaechele, who’s (usually) vegetarian, explains that the highly talented Mona chef, Vince Trim, made a consommé from the bones and served it alongside a dish of ravioli. “It was delicious,” she says.
I have in mind that she might be interested to come to Sydney and share this radical approach to sustainability – environmental and social – with our audience and help unleash some of the courage and humour that can really start to change the status quo.
And also, perhaps introduce more thinking around food security and invasive species.
Food security is a real issue. We need to think differently about what is and what is not acceptable to put on our plates; much of our habits around food are cultural and based on habit, instead of fact.
And we reason that the property industry has an amazing opportunity to integrate a more creative approach with the emerging tsunami of interest in urban greening perhaps by offering much more by way of food cultivation amidst developments.
We want Kaechele to bring “different” to Sydney, to open up the mind and loosen up the courage vibes a bit.
In an interview with Assemble Papers (we’re fans) about Eat the Problem Kaechele says the environmental movement needs a makeover.
“There’s something one-dimensional about heavy-handed environmentalism. It’s dualistic, and that’s not rich enough.
“The question is: how can you be both environmental and have space for all of this complexity?
“Complexity is ecological. It’s about getting away from the black-and-white, right-and-wrong position, which perpetuates the duality and makes people who are not environmentally–minded hate environmentalists.”
But though I think it will be interesting to introduce some unusual foods as part of an event featuring Kaechele and the concept of thinking differently to get creative outcomes for our problems, I’m not going to include feral cats.
Or any other feral animals.
That’s an attitude, I later discover, that’s “a bit Sydney”.
Someone I know tried to start a business around unusual foods, such as mealworm ice-cream, crickets and such. See this link about seven countries where crickets are a delicacy and source of protein. Or this Australia site where a startup is looking for crowdfunding for cricket corn chips. And here where you can get your garlic hit with crickets.
Or the GrubsUp store in WA “providing a sustainable food source for generations to come” where whole roasted mealworms will only set you back $10.67. And if you want to know what the crickets eat, it’s “recycled fruit and vegetables, and a dry food mix.”
CSIRO is even in on the act (and who knew these nerdy folks had such a sense of humour) with this publication: An industry with legs: Australia’s first edible insects roadmap.
But Sydney? Yeah, nah.
We’re not serving feral cats either at our Tomorrowland summit
or at the Tomorrowland Soiree with Kirsha Kaechele the night before. We promise.
What we will have, however, is a sample of unusual foods that are sure to tingle your taste buds. Amid more familar offerings.