EXCERPT Since 2008, Vienna-based ‘semi-nomadic organization’ AO& have developed and refined a unique practice which sees them bringing their knowledge of produce and culinary skills to bear in extensive tours of the landscape and intensive occupations of buildings which become spaces for the serving of their strikingly minimalist, concentrated multi-course meals. Collapse met the members of AO& (Philipp Furtenbach, Philipp Riccabona, Thomas A. Wisser, Rainer Fehlinger) during their Fall 2011 residency, in a derelict shopfront on the Lower East Side of New York, billed as ‘240 hours nonstop ambulatory on ground aggregation, accommodation, eating and drinking plants and animals of the season, aliments of disclosed NY origin, multiple differentiated courses’. AO&’s policy of personally sourcing every one of their ingredients contributes to an intimate familiarity with every aspect of their meals’ preparation. If in effect their work entails a rigorous insistence on the full inhabitation of the problem of food in contemporary society, it certainly goes beyond the moralism of the various environmentalist food lobbies. As they describe, their ‘perverse’ practice of cookery extends our understanding of ‘food preparation’ beyond the confines of the kitchen, exposing social, ecological and architectural dimensions of the culinary…