Maaleipä Challenge
“Maa” in Finnish = soil, dirt, earth, surface of Earth, ground, country, land
“Leipä” in Finnish = bread
The Maaleipä Challenge is a nationwide challenge contest and work of art realised by the London-based artist duo Cooking Sections and the contemporary art commissioning agency IHME Helsinki. Maaleipä Challenge is part of Cooking Sections’ CLIMAVORE project that asks how to eat as humans change climates.
Cooking Sections challenges you to create new bread recipes that can be used in large kitchens, homes, restaurants, and bakeries. The challenge is being run in cooperation with farmers and growers’ networks, promoting the cultural heritage of seeds, grain diversity, agroecology, and climate-resilient varieties that require fewer chemicals.
Grain cultivation has a long history in Finland. However, the demand for crops to be used in animal feed has now reduced the amount of land available for the primary ingredients of human plant-based diets, while intensifying the monoculture farming of oats, barley, wheat, and rye. As a consequence, agrochemicals seeping into the ground, and eventually into the Baltic Sea, are exhausting soil and water systems both inland and offshore.
We hope that the breads will be of many kinds and shapes and reflect the diversity of Finland’s population and baking techniques. The challenge aims to raise awareness of the importance of plants in human nutrition for tackling the climate emergency. It supports forms of land use that promote flourishing soil cultures, and which are currently neglected or overlooked by regulatory and subsidy frameworks.
Why Cooking Sections?
IHME Helsinki promotes critical art and the sustainability transformation, and that’s why we invite artists who think without bias about what art and art-making can be in a time of polycrises. Cooking Sections carry out projects whose goal is not only a change in thinking and action, but also a change in the system. The core of their modus operandi is gathering the latest scientific knowledge by meeting researchers and experienced experts. Despite their premises based on researched knowledge, the artworks themselves are approachable, narrative and experiential, and anyone can join in. It is great to be able to cooperate with Cooking Sections and to invite the public living in Finland to join in IHME Helsinki Commission 2024, which involves thinking about and baking the bread of the future,
says IHME Helsinki Executive Director and curator Paula Toppila enthusiastically.
IHME Helsinki’s operations are developed and the selection of artists made by its Advisory Board under the leadership of Paula Toppila. The Advisory Board includes: Ute Meta Bauer, Professor at Nanyang Technological University Singapore; Hanna Guttorm, Senior Researcher of indigenous studies at the University of Helsinki; Antti Majava, artist and researcher at BIOS Research Center; and Jussi Parikka, Professor at Aarhus University.
