Coordination is elusive. It unfolds across intervals, through overlapping temporalities, and resists capture in a single moment.

As Elaine Gan and Anna Tsing suggest, it is precisely this dispersed, processual quality that allows things to hold together. The translocal dinner during the Winter Assembly made this condition tangible.

Taking place as part of the concluding gathering of Art as Ecological Practice at M.1 of the Arthur Boskamp-Stiftung in Hohenlockstedt on February 14, 2026, the multi-course dinner was conceived as a performative, collaborative experiment in coordination. Conceived by Seraina Grupp, Byungseo Yoo, Ruben Rudolph and Ronald Kolb, it translated ecological critique into an embodied and social experience. Rather than representing ecological relations, the dinner enacted them.

At its core was the notion of scarcity as a productive condition. The menu drew on local winter ingredients—stored roots, potatoes and various types of cabbage (Kale, white cabbage, Brussels sprouts), preserved vegetables, fermented components—combined with techniques and knowledge from diverse culinary traditions. Scarcity did not appear as lack, but as a generative constraint that required attentiveness, improvisation, and collective decision-making.

The dinner began in the exhibition space with the preparation of charcuterie, accompanied by sparkling wine and kombucha. Rather than traditional meat-based charcuterie, this course was developed using vegetables treated with Edelschimmel (noble mould) and subsequently dehydrated, creating a charcuterie-like experience through microbial transformation. This opening moment turned the exhibition space into a site of production and encounter. What followed was a sequence of courses that gradually unfolded a dense network of relations:

A clear vegetable bouillon established a grounding in simplicity and extraction. The vegetables came from Biohof Springhoe, which supplied many of the ingredients used throughout the menu. For the bouillon, leftover parts and trimmings—elements typically discarded during preparation—were consciously reused, foregrounding practices of reduction, reuse, and attentive resource management.

Wheat dumplings with tempeh and Brussels sprouts introduced fermentation and plant-based protein as translational practices. Kaviar served on fir branches—sourced from local fish farming—brought together forestry, aquaculture, and presentation, embedding the dish within specific regional ecologies. The kaviar was purchased from the fish farm Fischzucht Kortmann in Hohenweststedt, where it is produced from sturgeon—a species that was once common in the region but had become locally extinct—thus reintroducing a historical ecological presence through contemporary aquaculture practices.

The following course, a “champagne” fond with lemon oyster mushrooms, smoked sturgeon, and Jerusalem artichoke, further layered local production with culinary reinterpretation. Kale (Grünkohl) dumplings paired with fermented kale (kimchi) and a European-style miso (almond koji cream) explicitly crossed culinary traditions, translating techniques across geographies while remaining rooted in local material conditions.

Sourdough bread with flour from a regional mill in Wrist, served with koji butter, emphasized grain production and processing as fundamental ecological practices.The last main course—deer or tempeh with parsnips and vegan jus—was directly connected to earlier collaborations within the project: the deer originated from a hunting intervention led by local forester Björn Berling, undertaken to regulate the population and enable the regeneration of a self-seeding forest. In this way, the dish foregrounded not only a choice between animal-based and plant-based nourishment, but also situated hunting within a broader ecological management practice, revealing how different modes of resource use are entangled with questions of care, sustainability, and landscape stewardship.

Toward the end, the meal shifted into collective and shared experiences. A kimchi granita was served in a single bowl, inviting participants to eat together and dissolving individual portions into a communal gesture, based on clay sculptures by Seraina Grupp.

A rose and elderflower stone jelly with preserved cornelian cherry blossoms was accompanied by cherry buds—young branches brought by Wiebke Habbe, who also introduced a bitter tea as a digestive element after the dessert by Ruben Rudolph. Habbe works with the preservation of fruits and herbs from her garden, extending seasonal cycles through practices of storing and fermenting. This interlude foregrounded taste as both sensory and functional, linking digestion to ecological knowledge.

A selection of regional cheeses from Schleswig-Holstein, closed the sequence with a reflection on preservation, seasonality, and microbial time. The cheeses were sourced through the Käsestraße Schleswig-Holstein, a network of dairy farmers, and obtained via Käserei Möllgaard, which supports the distribution and visibility of these products beyond local contexts, thereby extending the ecological and economic relations embedded in the meal.

Yet the menu itself was only the visible surface of a much more complex process. The actual structure of the project lay in the coordination that preceded it: sourcing ingredients, negotiating availability, engaging with local producers, testing and rejecting combinations, and aligning different culinary knowledges. What appeared on the plate was thus a condensation of these negotiations.

In this sense, the dinner functioned as a temporary social sculpture—an edible network of relations between soil, climate, cultural memory, and collective experimentation. Ecological practice was not presented as an abstract concept or moral claim. It became tangible through taste, texture, temperature, and the act of sharing. It was simultaneously culturally negotiated and physically incorporated.

The temporal choreography of the evening further emphasized this coordination. Wines were opened in advance, courses carefully timed, and transitions orchestrated to maintain a continuous flow—supported by many helping hands that formed a human-based infrastructure within a broader more-than-human coordination from start to end. This rhythm revealed ecology not as a static condition, but as an ongoing alignment of processes unfolding in time.

As part of the Winter Assembly, the translocal dinner demonstrated that art as ecological practice operates through activating, making, and relating. It shifted the exhibition from a space of representation to a space of encounter and transformation. What remained was not a fixed outcome, but a set of relations that continued beyond the event: in conversations, in shared techniques, and in the embodied memory of taste.

In this way, the dinner did not conclude the project. It dispersed it—into practices, into networks, and into future forms of collaboration.