The Lost Food Banquet of the North
Presented in March 2025 at the McCord Stewart Museum (Montreal, Canada) via the Fika(s) Festival, The Lost Food Banquet of the North is a Place Courage immersive and participatory exhibition, exploring the memory of dishes and ingredients from Nordic and circumpolar regions.
Combining written stories, audio, video, handcrafted objects, and live testimonies, this installation invites the public to sit at a banquet to discover, exchange, and enrich the shared stories. More than 800 stories were collected from communities involved throughout the process, and arranged in various forms on a banquet table.
This project celebrates the connections between biodiversity and intergenerational transmission for anyone who calls “The North” their home, while addressing mourning, preservation, and the revitalization of living heritage. The collective has traveled to co-create with Nordic and circumpolar communities from both America and Europe in order to foster intercultural conversations. The stories of the Inuit, Innu, and Sámi peoples form an important part of the banquet, alongside stories from Montreal, Quebec, Finnish, Swedish, Icelandic, Norwegian, Danish, and Alaskan communities. Supported by these local and international friendships, Place Courage invites the weaving of bridges between communities, generations, and culinary memories.
Do you have a lost dish story you’d like to see featured in the next banquet exhibition? Submit it here via our form.
An audio description, in french only, has been recorded and is available here.
The Lost Food Banquet of the North is a participatory exhibition by the duo Place Courage presented by FIKA(S) in collaboration with the McCord Stewart Museum and with the support of the Norwegian Embassy in Ottawa.
Place Courage thanks the individuals and communities who shared their stories. Thanks to Samuel Lagacé (Kuujjuaq) for allowing excerpts from his film Aivvianiq (The Walrus Hunt) to be shown in the installation. Thanks also to the City of Turku in Finland for its invaluable collaboration. Thank you to Anne Paré, who performed songs in several sections of the banquet. Thanks also to the many people we met during the duo’s travels.
Place Courage would like to thank the Conseil des arts de Montréal for its support of the collective, the Canada Council for the Arts for its creation and production support, and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec for its travel support.
