A table of various honeycombs and delicacies. A person uses a butter knife to scrape a small amount of dark brown honey from one section of honeycomb.

Program Sydney Design Week 2023 Eco Systems

Supper Sessions x Sydney Design Week

Program

Supper Sessions x Sydney Design Week is a long table dining experience conceived as a hive for community, food, performance and collective support.

This multi-course vegetarian dinner at Ace Hotel Sydney will celebrate the critical role of bees in supporting biodiversity.

The menu has been developed by Jez Wick, head chef at Refettorio OzHarvest in collaboration with Xinyi Lim, curator of food programming for Sydney Design Week 2023. It will feature bee products such as local honey and honeycomb alongside ingredients from crops that depend on bee pollination, including edible flowers, onions, buckwheat, pumpkin, cucumber and tomatoes.

Honey Fingers will contribute a honeycomb installation alongside visuals from the Powerhouse Collection exploring the symbiotic role of bees in our lives and Marcus Whale will present a hive-like sonic performance with Eugene Choi.

Profits from the dinner go towards a grant for an independent designer to kickstart a creative project. Tickets to Supper Sessions x Sydney Design Week are inclusive of a multi-course dinner and drinks by Viticult, Konpira Maru and Poor Toms.

Exhibitors

Supper Sessions is a grassroots arts funding initiative raising independent grants and opportunities for individuals in the creative industries through community fine dining.Featuring music, performance and surprise, Supper Sessions celebrate collective joy, community breaking bread and generating support for one another.

Jez Wick's 20-year cooking career has taken her around the world: after more than a decade cooking in fine dining kitchens across Europe and beyond, she moved to Sydney to join the Refettorio OzHarvest team as head chef. Wick aims to bring people together, share delicious food, fight food waste, transform cultures and create beauty. Fermentation and pickling are at the heart of her cooking style.

Honey Fingers is an interdisciplinary, deeply collaborative, beekeeping practice that places Apis mellifera (the common honeybee) at the centre of its work. Its projects investigate, communicate and promote thoughtful consideration of humanity’s impact upon, and dislocation from, the natural world.

Marcus Whale lives and works on Gadigal land in Sydney, Australia. Working across music, art and performance, Whale's singular music spans popular and classical forms to expose the monstrous transcendence of desire.

Xinyi Lim’s (林心仪) exploration of the Australian food industry has seen her cooking in several notable kitchens in Sydney including Cafe Freda’s in Darlinghurst (where she was opening head chef) and three-hatted restaurant Firedoor in Surry Hills (NSW Restaurant of the Year 2023) while maintaining her commitment to social causes through work with enterprises such as Welcome Merchant, Two Good Co and OzHarvest. She is currently a food consultant, food stylist and freelance chef, and continues to write, philosophise and converse about all things food and culture.