Gabriela Aquije Zegarra (Lima, 1990) is a gardener, cook, and Peruvian architect focused on the social, spatial and ecological relationships within food pathways. She has grounded and nurtured her practice through collaborations with land-based and creative practitioners, as well as agricultural communities mainly in Peru, Germany, and Switzerland.
As a researcher and educator at the IXDM Research team, in Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW (HGK), she works and experiments at the intersection of critical design pedagogies, agroecological urbanism and situated food practices, from seed to pot and back to the soil. Inspired by the legacy of community kitchens, food sovereignty, and peasant movements, she challenges her land-scape design practice through reciprocity-economy rehearsals in gemeinschaftsgartens (community gardens), and through anti-oppressive joys of collective cooking.
Currently at the MAKE/SENSE program, she’s documenting and translating this practice in a recipe book and living archive to share her PhD project “Culinary Return”. As well, she’s part of the SNSF – SPIRIT project “Nurturing Inter-structures / Inter-estructuras de Cuidado y Nutricion”, a transnational research between the IXDM, ETH-CARE and FUBU, in Switzerland, and PUCP-CIAC, CONAMOVIDI and CHIRAPAQ, in Peru.
As you read this, she moves between territories of urban gardens, farms and kitchens, forests and conference rooms, local markets and exhibitions, re-rooting knowledges and rehearsing more coherent ways to live — and eat – as nature.
