Energetic Entanglements

locality, energy, and the labor of nourishment
31 January – 2 February 2025

As part of Thinking with a garden residency series Energetic Entanglements was an invitation by our architect-in-residence Mascha Fehse to join a collective practice to reflect, build, and speculate on an embodied relationship with energy and nourishment through the creation of a heating and cooking prototype that is not only a tool; but also a proposition, a question, and an experiment. It’s also a conversation starter, and perhaps, a guide to rethinking our entanglements with energy and sustenance.

This stove is envisioned as a creature of adaptability, drawing upon energy sources present in its immediate environment—dry branches, manure, potentially also wind and sunlight—to transform raw ingredients into life-sustaining meals. Within surrounding mono-cultures, this stove confronts concepts of highly specialised, mono-functional products with an openness to transform and learn. Together considered the interplay between energy, locality, and the labor of nourishment: what does it mean to adapt to what is around us, to work with what is abundantly available within the systems we create or interfere in, and to imagine practicable and simultaneously imaginative processes of making food?

It takes inspiration from a practice of thinking-through-making—a way of engaging not only with tools, common goods and energies, but also with the broader relations they evoke: to the soil, the sun, the wind, and the beings we share our spaces with. It is an invitation to move beyond mastery and unquestioned comfort into kinship with what sustains us and the warmth of hosting friends.

Through hands-on learning we elaborated on the stove’s design, bringing it to life as a working prototype while leaving space for speculative features to emerge. This process invites us to reflect on material sources and practicalities—what is possible now, and what futures might this stove imagine for us? We were working with basic building techniques such as masonry, clay treatment and carpentry. We inaugurated and tested the stove in its first meal-making efforts, inviting questions and provocations. Can it truly be a companion for nourishing resilience?

Architect-in-residence

Mascha Fehse is a trained architect based in Berlin. She deals with questions that concern public space and the commons, focusing on micro-scale collisions, applied experimental approaches and a design discourse that triggers curiosity and leaves room for a variety of perspectives. Her works orbit around social constellations, infrastructural relations, structural connections, sustainable conditions, imaginative associations, and constructive tensions, having resulted in a range of collaboratively produced, socially and ecologically committed spaces.

Image: Mascha Fehse + Foresta Collective