What do we carry with us when home shifts? How might plants help us cultivate new ways of belonging in a changing world? What worlds are held within a recipe, and how might they change as the climate changes?

The World Is a Mill is an artistic research project by Dani Admiss and Luiza Prado exploring the relationships between plants, migration, food sovereignty and climate adaptation.

The project follows the common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris), a plant that has travelled across continents through cultivation, colonial trade and migration, becoming entangled with different histories of food, labour, class and belonging.

As people carry seeds between places, plants also shape the ways people settle, cultivate, eat and relate to the land. The project begins with this reciprocal relationship, asking how the everyday practices of growing and sharing food might help people find new forms of solidarity and collective life amid displacement and environmental change.

Beginning with a Bean Banquet at Fearon Hall in Loughborough, the project brought migrant communities, artists, growers and cooks together to share recipes, food and knowledge. These exchanges developed into Bean Silo, an interactive sculptural installation that invites visitors to deposit a bean and receive a printed recipe from a growing community archive.

Developed with computer scientist Dr Mohamad Saada, the accompanying relational database connects beans and recipes to their geographic origins, migration histories and projected future growing conditions. Through sound, data and the simple gesture of exchange, the silo makes visible the relationships between plants, people and changing environments.

Together, the artwork and database explore how inherited knowledge and scientific understandings of climate change might inform one another. What happens when familiar crops can no longer grow where they once did? What might people adapt, preserve or carry forward? And where does adaptation become loss?

The World Is a Mill approaches kitchens and gardens as places where people are already experimenting with ways of living together, cultivating relationships and making home in an uncertain world.

Format: Bean Banquets, Interactive bean silo sculpture, Interviews, Artistic research, and living archive

People & Partners

Artists and project leads: Dani Admiss and Luiza Prado

Sculpture technology and relational database: Dr Mohamad Saada, computer scientist, Loughborough University

Commissioning and institutional partner: Radar, Loughborough University

Curated by: Lucy Lopez

Community collaboration: Artists, growers, cooks and participants from the Bean Banquet at Fearon Hall, Loughborough

With contributions and support from: The wider Loughborough food-growing, artistic and community networks involved in the project's development.