Kartoffelkäfer
2026
Kartoffienale 0
Heicheiheim, Germany
Kartoffelkäfer is a participatory cooking performance in which participants are invited to make fried Klöße shaped like potato beetles. The potato beetle, a notorious agricultural pest, is surrounded by a Cold War-era myth that it was deliberately dropped from US military planes onto potato fields in the GDR. The performance plays with the uneasy proximity between repulsion and care: participants transform a pest, something associated with destruction and harm, into something handmade, edible, and cared for. Through this process, Kartoffelkäfer asks how categories such as pest, edible, and harmful are culturally constructed, and how acts of making and eating might shift our relationship to what we perceive as threatening or undesirable.
Exhibition and residency are part of the project This Village is Not Yet Another Backdrop for Art!, curated and organized by Ameer Masoud in cooperation with Heichelheimer Kartoffel e.V.