Artist in
residence
Artist in Residence at the Food Design Playground
We are thrilled to introduce our current and upcoming Artists in Residence at the Food Design Playground.
Our residency program invites forward-thinking creatives to explore the world of food through a design lens. This season, our resident artist is delving into the emotional and cultural layers of eating rituals, using food as both medium and metaphor. With a background in interdisciplinary art and a deep curiosity for sensory experience, they are transforming everyday ingredients into thought-provoking installations, performances, and participatory experiments.
Throughout their residency, the artist engages with our community through hands-on workshops, open studio days, and informal tasting sessions — offering a unique glimpse into their evolving process. Their work challenges our assumptions about food, sparks meaningful conversations, and encourages visitors to see the act of eating in new and unexpected ways.
The residency is not only about producing outcomes; it's about exploration, play, and pushing boundaries. It is an invitation to think differently — about what we eat, how we eat, and why it matters.
Come and experience it for yourself. Stay tuned for public events, sneak peeks, and a final showcase of their work at the end of the residency.
Sylvia Adventure
Sylvia Avontuur – permaculturist, pioneer, urban grower
Sylvia Avontuur made a career change from marketing and communications to permaculture design. Regenerative thinking and ethics are now at the forefront of her work. She is a permaculture designer, sets up neighborhood and school gardens, and is a lecturer in Corporate Social Responsibility at an international business school in Amsterdam. She facilitates the Urban Permaculture Design Course (PDC) program for Cityplot and is Climate Mayor of Haarlem.
For Sylvia, a garden is not an end product, but a process. She works with creators, knowledge carriers, and silent voices to create gardens that are more than just beautiful—they are meaningful, educational, and political.
In the Silent Garden, she translates her favorite permaculture principle—use edges and value the marginal—into a living place where legumes, worms, heritage breeds, and forgotten knowledge play the leading role. Every corner of the garden poses a question: Who decides what is valuable? And what happens when we look at the edges?
Silent Garden – You Reap What You Sow
The garden is the kitchen's supplier. What we sow, we reap. What grows feeds the seasons. What the kitchen has left over returns to the garden. A cycle that completes itself.
Sylvia Avontuur designs the garden based on permaculture principles—together with creators and quiet rebels. The garden grows with each season: what sprouts in spring, blooms in summer, is harvested in fall, and stored in winter directly nourishes the experiences within—workshops, dinners, exhibitions, experiments.
What is sprouting in the Silent Garden?
Ideas that continue to grow. Experiments that close the circle. Consider:
Red Wrigglers & the Worm Hotel: Designed by Rowin Snijder of Compostier. Here, worms transform all kitchen scraps into black gold—compost that nourishes the garden.
Palestinian heritage garden: With Merijn Tol. Crops under pressure, flavors full of meaning.
Nepal AI Awareness Corner: An investigation into data colonization and food sovereignty. Contaminated data creates poisoned systems—just as contaminated and depleted soil produces unhealthy plants.
Nitrogen-fixing beans: Quietly enriching the soil.
Re-wilding borders: Self-seeding pioneer species that demonstrate the regenerative power of nature.
Marginalized knowledge holders: Women with immigrant backgrounds whose legume traditions are undervalued but are incredibly rich.
Use margins and appreciate the marginal
The Silent Garden draws inspiration from permaculture principles: use edges and appreciate the marginal.
What is dismissed as "peripheral" or "marginal" often turns out to be the most valuable. Legumes have been marginalized as "cheap animal feed," but they are proving to be the heroes of our food revolution. Parts of plants we forgot to eat—broad bean tops, radish leaves, flowers—are reappearing on the menu. And just as pioneer plants are the first to colonize fallow land, new ideas flourish on the margins.
You Reap What You Sow
What we plant—in soil, in data, in stories—determines what grows. In the Silent Garden, we listen to what nature has been trying to tell us for a long time.
Terri Salminen
Terri Salminen is the culinary artist in residence at Food Design Playground. Raised in the Italian countryside with roots in Finnish, Scottish, and French heritage, she grew up experiencing the kitchen as a place of gathering, curiosity, and shared life — an approach that still defines her work today.
With a background in philosophy, Terri sees food as a way of thinking: a practical, sensory language for exploring culture, identity, and connection. She works with highly seasonal ingredients, regenerative principles, and a deep attention to herbs, greens, and edible plants, creating food that is thoughtful, alive, and grounded in place.
Alongside her cooking practice, Terri teaches culinary arts, researches food culture, and develops educational and creative projects. At Food Design Playground, she explores experimental approaches to food, including her ongoing work on the Perfume Pantry, where scent, memory, and taste meet.
Perfume Pantry
At Food Design Playground, Terri Salminen works at the intersection of scent, taste, and teaching. As our culinary mentor during the food design retreats, she guides participants in understanding ingredients not just as products, but as carriers of culture, memory, and meaning.
Her ongoing project, the Perfume Pantry, is a growing collection of fragrant preparations — dried leaves, pickles, candied peels, infused salts, ferments, and other aromatic elements. These are not simply preserves, but a sensory toolkit that adds signature layers of flavor to Playground dishes. The pantry changes with the seasons and is closely connected to what grows in the garden, turning harvests into edible scent archives.
Alongside this work, Terri hosts workshops as part of her Language of Food program, where she helps people metaphorically read, understand, and speak through food. Have a look here to get your tickets to her workshops.
Whether mentoring, preserving, teaching, or cooking, her work at the Playground invites you to taste more attentively and to notice how flavor is never just flavor—it is always a story.
Inés Lauber
Studio Inés Lauber is a conceptual food and design studio based in Berlin and Beelitz-Heilstaetten, Germany since 2012. The studio raises awareness on the subjects of sustainability, seasonality, locality, and maintaining biodiversity through storytelling and conceptual design.
Experimenting with foraged ingredients and traditional preserving methods, researching the healing aspects and cultural values of food, the studio blurs the boundaries between forgotten and modern, traditional and new, food and art, offering food concepts that not only feed your body, but also your mind.
Got beans?
Inés Lauber will be having her residency in the Summer of 2026, creating a project for the Summer version of the Bean there (done that) festival.
Inés brings a playful, interactive project to Food Design Playground that reimagines one of the most humble ingredients: beans. Rich in protein, often local, and incredibly versatile, legumes are usually treated as savory staples — but Inés explores what happens when we let them be something else entirely.
Inspired by the iconic milk bars of the 1950s and the bold nostalgia of classic milk campaigns, she is developing a Bean Bar where beans and peas transform into milkshakes, ice creams, and other surprising treats. New recipes, careful design, and a sense of humor all play a role.
The Bean Bar is not just about tasting. Visitors may step into a playful world of bean glamour, with elements like a mock "Got Beans?" campaign or photo moment, turning legumes into something joyful, nostalgic, and unexpectedly fun.