Den goda maten (The Benevolent Food)

Ten artists, researchers and curators from different parts of the world gathered in Giron/Kiruna to kick off Den goda maten in August 2025. Set in Kiruna, a place of rapidly changing climates and geopolitical pressure, the gathering is a site for sharing knowledge, artistic research, and practices of care rooted in food systems and critical ecological thinking.

In the context of intensifying violent crises, extractive economies, and accelerating climate change, questions of food security are becoming increasingly urgent. From supply chain disruption and the inheritances of colonial food systems to the loss of biodiversity and soil degradation, the future of food is entangled with broader planetary and political crises. Den goda maten asks how artistic practice imagines and enacts more just and sustainable relationships with land, food, and each other. Indigenous and traditional forms of knowledge surrounding food, including how it is grown, shared, prepared, and protected are vital to past, present, and future food sovereignty. Indigenous knowledge systems which are shaped through generations of lived experience, offer insights for rethinking narratives of growth, monoculture, control, and consumption.

 The Swedish word goda means both delicious and good; in translating it as benevolent, we draw attention to the interdependent relationships between bodies and land through the cultivation, preparation, and sharing of food. But benevolence also implies something darker in that what is given can also be taken away. To think of food as a benevolent gesture is to confront our fragile relationship to food systems which can nourish or exploit, support or dispossess. Given this, Den goda maten asks: how do we recognise and participate in reciprocal actions toward the places, people, and more-than-human lives that invisibly sustain us across vast distances?

Beyond daily sustenance, food nourishes us in material and symbolic ways, it brings joy, holds cultural memory, creates opportunities for connection, and sustains human labour and imagination. Food is a mediator of relationships, between humans and plants, between land and politics, between history and the present.

The inquiry is evolving over the coming years, through commissions, screenings, events and publications with invited artists including Åsa Sonjasdotter, Cooking Sections, Elia Nurvista, Fernando García-Dory and INLAND, Keg de Souza, Kultivator, Myvillages, Olga Tsaplya Egorova, Natalia Shapkina, Victoria Harnesk and curators Madeleine Collie and Maria Lind. Den goda maten is part of Kin’s multiyear enquiry The Critical Zone.

August Gathering 2025

The August gathering for Den Goda Maten brought together artists to Kin Musuem of Contemporary Art with the Food Art Research Network for the beginning of our collective exploration of food and practice. The programme began with a workshop led by Myvillages, where all the artists introduced themselves through food, bringing an ingredient or dish from their place of departure.

Across five days in and around Kiruna, the group moved between collective learning, public engagement and site-based encounters. A walk through old Kiruna with Agneta Andersson explored the ongoing displacement of communities becuase of the expanding iron ore mine. This was followed by a public session at the museum where artists shared their research and viewed Åsa Sonjasdotter’s film Cultivating Abundance. Informal exchanges continued over a potluck dinner at Maria Lind’s home, sharing food that we cooked and brought from afar.

Visits to Puoltsa and Nikkaluokta opened engagement with local ecologies and Sámi knowledge. The group foraged for berries with Kerstin Nilsson of Ofelas, speaking of struggles for land rights we shared tea, mushrooms and cooked bread over a fire. We learnt about the layers of “forna” that are cultivated by the reindeers pastures.

We visited Nikkaluokta to hear from Anne Sari about Sámi food culture, she shared books and resources collected over years and the struggle to maintain the herding way of life. With the Sarri family we  travelled by boat to the waters of lake Paittasjärvi connected to the nearby glacier.

Visits to Samegården Sámi Museum, Jukkasjärvi homestead museum, the church and Nutti Sámi Siida offered more connection to local elders and knowledge holders. Throughout we were thinking and eating together about what is grown, gathered, traded and transported.