Supermarketforest is a long term project by team of people lead by Andrew Merritt one half of the practice Something & Son, that looks to reserve the supermarket as the end point of a destructive industrial food chain, instead placing it at the beginning where the products on the shelves are kits for growing forests of edible and medicinal species.
The supermarket provides us with all our daily needs. Where once we wandered the woods for our food, we now wander the aisles. This project subverts the idea of a supermarket through sculpture and interactive design. Supermarketforest is a long term project that looks to reserve the supermarket as the end point of a destructive industrial food chain, instead placing it at the beginning where the products on the shelves are kits for growing forests of edible and medicinal species.
The project takes the shape of a supermarket, but not as we know it. A typical supermarket is the end point for materials taken from the planet - a kind of cemetery - Supermarketforest is the opposite, its the birth centre for rebuilding ecosystems.
An imagined, future forest replaces vacuum-packed, plastic, consumerist products; shelves packed with ecosystems, familiar shapes with unfamiliar fillings. On the supermarket shelves are sculptural multipacks of popular products and brands - so far six moulds of multipacks have been produced: coca-cola bottles, canned fish, tinned beans, Dorito salsa jars, vitamins packs and Tetra bottled milk. The moulds are filled with seed, soil and mycelium, dried on the supermarket shelves and then dispersed into the landscape during the growing months.
The products on sale can actively regenerate landscapes from gardens, parks or grounds to more systematic and large-scale sites such as industrial agriculture fields or former industrial sites. Each multipack sculpture contains agroforestry seeds of three different types of species from small ground cover plants to trees. When planted the sculpture biodegrades into the landscapes releasing the seeds whilst providing them with a kick start of nutrients to give the plants the best chance of successfully germinating.
The long term aim is to have enough diversity in products that eventually takes over abandoned supermarket/s. These would act as the centre of the regeneration of whole area of land/s with the sculptures filling whole fields - land art that provides people and other species with food.
The first incarnation of the project - a solo exhibition at Orleans House Gallery - used agroforestry seeds but future stages could become Supermarketarid or Supermarketwetland for example.
Andrew Merritt’s work explores social and environmental issues via everyday scenarios, criss-crossing the boundaries between the visual arts, architecture and activism. Through permanent installations, functional sculptures and public performances, projects provide a framework or foundation for communities and ecologies to build upon. Works mimic the everyday to act as familiar starting point and then take the subject into new realms. Merritt is one half of the artist duo Something & Son.
Something & Son have exhibited at Tate Britain, Tate Modern, V&A Museum, Manchester International Festival, Gwangju Biennale, South Korea, Deon Foundation, Vienna Biennale/MAK, Artangel, Milan Design Week, FACT, Cultural Olympia, Somerset House, Folkestone Art Triennial, Design Museum, Royal Botanical Gardens Kew, the Wellcome Collection, South London Gallery and Istanbul Design Biennial. Andrew has been a resident at The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and in 2022 at The Politics of Food at Delfina Foundation, London.
Talks and workshops include the Serpentine Gallery, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Science Museum, SALT, EPFL Institute of Architecture, Cork Institute of Technology, Royal College of Art, Central Saint Martins, Riga Technical University, Design Indaba, British Council, ICA and the Barbican.
Andrew is a founder of Makerversity, Somerset House which has won the Network for Innovations in Culture and Creativity in Europe’ Prize and The Guardian’s 50 New Radicals. Previous projects have also been selected as the New York Times Design Honor list and selected as one of nine Gift of the Games from the London Olympics.
