Maa: Finnish for soil, dirt, earth, surface of the Earth, ground, country, land
Leipä: Finnish for bread
Artists Cooking Sections, founded by Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe, have devised the nationwide Maaleipä (bread for the soil) Challenge for the art-commissioning agency IHME Helsinki. Part of Cooking Sections’ wider research platform, CLIMAVORE, the challenge explores how we eat as humans change climates.
Running from April 15 until September 1, 2024, the challenge was open to all bread bakers in Finland. It attracted recipes from across the country, culminating in a celebration of fourteen Maaleipä breads at the Maaleipä Feast hosted in Helsinki on 21 September 2024.
Finland boasts a diverse bread culture, with ingredients, shapes and flavours varying by tradition and region. However, monoculture farming and intensive land use has depleted soils and polluted waters, resulting in nutritionally poor food that harms human and more-than-human digestive systems.
As a public art commission, Cooking Sections’ Maaleipä Challenge encouraged bakers to consider bread ingredients through the lens of environmental well-being, from the ground up. IHME Helsinki fosters art that promotes the cultural shift needed to address the environmental crisis, and the Maaleipä Challenge is at the heart of that change.
“Maaleipä brought together a diverse group of bakers with farmers and experts in ecology, agriculture, and food policy to envision the future of land use, agroecological grain cultivation, and bread production in Finland. We were excited to see how the nationwide Challenge could support farmers and growers in enhancing soil health across the country, and how we can strengthen soil cultures through cultural production,” said the artists of Cooking Sections.
Maaleipä is bread for the soil. All fourteen challenge finalists thoughtfully explored the connection between land, sea and gut health in their recipes. Many of the breads were made with sourdough and flours from organic landrace grains. Ingredients like yesterday’s porridge, root vegetables, pine bark flour (pettu), acorns, wild herbs, so-called weeds and invasive plants, local fruits and vegetables, and a range of seeds from the changing climates of the Baltic shores were central to these Maaleipä recipes.
Although the Challenge is over for now, the breads will live on. We encourage you to be inspired by these recipes, share them, and develop new breads that nurture the soil, the sea and ourselves. The finalist recipes are available now on the Challenge website: maaleipa.fi.
IHME Helsinki commissions works of contemporary art that unite the worlds of art, science and climate work. IHME’s core activity is the annual staging of a new artwork, together with artists and Finnish and foreign partners, in public space in Finland and abroad.
IHME Helsinki’s operations are developed, and the selection of artists made by its Advisory Board under the leadership of the Executive Director and Curator Paula Toppila. The Advisory Board includes: Ute Meta Bauer, Professor at Nanyang Technological University Singapore; Hanna Guttorm, Senior Researcher of indigenous studies at the University of Helsinki; Antti Majava, artist and researcher at BIOS Research Unit and Maria Lind, Director of Kin Museum of Contemporary Art in Kiruna.
Experts involved in the Maaleipä Challenge were: Project Leader Joshua Finch, Novia University of Applied Sciences; Research Professor Minna Kaljonen, Finnish Environment Institute, SYKE; Researcher Galina Kallio, Ruralia Institute, University of Helsinki; Postdoctoral researcher Kari Koppelmäki, Ruralia Institute, University of Helsinki; Bread culture entrepreneur Eliisa Kuusela, Leipäpaja; Farmer Jukka Lassila, Lassilan farm, farmer Magnus Selenius, Nyby Gård; Ruby Van Der Wekken, Oma Maa Co-operative and many others, read more at ihmehelsinki.fi.
IHME Helsinki’s work is made possible in the years 2023-2025 by the Saastamoinen Foundation, Kone Foundation and Abakanowicz Arts and Culture Charitable Foundation.
