Foodscape as reconnection. Reflections from a site-specific artistic intervention in Florence’s Sant’Ambrogio marketplace

Foodscape is a concept internally diversified and open to different conceptualizations. This paper seeks to take advantage of this mutability so as to highlight, and elaborate upon, the importance of reconnecting the different components of a local foodscape in terms of sustainability. Two elements identified as characteristic to how foodscape is conceptualized in literature become central here: the material-immaterial interrelation, and interscalarity. Empirically, we draw from the case-study of a site-specific video-art installation, as geographical research dissemination practice, inside the Sant’Ambrogio historical marketplace of Florence, Italy. The installation, precisely, performs the reconnections of material and immaterial food elements, of different scales of production and distribution, and of the spaces and practices involved in all the above, generating a food-centered geographical knowledge, which can eventually contribute to a broader food pedagogy based on sustainability ethics.