An Inclusive Exhibition on Food Traditions – And a More Inclusive Hotel and Restaurant Museum
The Hotel and Restaurant Museum’s diversity and inclusivity project is coming to an end. It’s time to bring together the results of the project.
The project (November 2023-March 2025) focused on increasing inclusion and diversity at the Hotel and Restaurant Museum through events and outreach to different members of the art and food community.
The project specifically focused on creating a program for the exhibition “Feeling Food” (20.09.2024- 24.08.2025), an exhibition focusing on food traditions in Finland. The project designer chosen is Yasmin Ibrahim, a cultural producer based in Helsinki with experience working in museums and with different forms of art, as well as experience working in the hospitality and restaurant industry.
The project employed artists and collaborated with organizations and institutions across the greater Helsinki region. In total, the events were attended by more than 100 people, and focused on varied topics such as natural food dyeing, fermentation, poetry, decolonization, feminist approaches to care, sustainability, archiving family recipes and queer and trans rights. The project hosted 11 events in total.
The partners and collaborators for the project included organizations as well as individuals. The organizations were Vantaa City Museum, Espoo City Museum, Laurea University of Applied Sciences, Culture for All, Kairos Helsinki, and Kollektiivi Collective. The individuals who participated in the project were Juliane Foronda, Muniba Rasheed, Anna Karima Wane, Dahn Kim, Alejandra Alarcon, Andrea Gilly Marquez and Noora Elharouny.
We at the museum would like to warmly thank everyone involved in the project. We also want to continue the practices we have learned from the project. Hopefully the cooperation and the network built around the museum during the project can continue after the end of the project.
The project was funded by Finnish Heritage Agency.