10km
10KM is an agricultural, culinary, and art project developed in collaboration with Saeda (Kaja Ludvigsen and Soufiane Lazrak) and Armin Tligui, 10KM started around a simple premise: creating a menu using only ingredients produced within a ten- kilometer radius of DDAR, a house in the countryside of Essaouira, Morocco.
The research began in the summer of 2025, rooted in a local ecosystem of farmers, neighbours, and producers whose traditional know-how enables sustenance over time, and culminated in December 2025 with the presentation of a meal for one hundred people, commissioned by NG.
10KM was initiated from a rather simple idea, yet it quickly raised questions tied to shifting seasonal cycles, water availability, and limited yields. Through these constraints, the project explores what it means to live in close relation with a specific landscape. It revealed how the contemporary world is more than ever dependent on imported produce and reliant on transformed raw ingredients, even in traditional and secluded regions like the one Elliot and Saeda worked in.
10KM therefore questions distance, access, and the distribution of natural resources, suggesting proximity as both a poetic gesture and a social urgency, and suggests that humans are smart by using the resources, materials, and wisdom found within the small circles around them. Techniques considered ancient— fermentation, acidification, enzymatic maturation, microbial activity, brining, preservation, maceration, and a broader sensitivity to living organisms— reappear as technologies that feel unexpectedly forefront in today’s world. This micro-local approach opens a space where minimalism, care, softness, and creative abundance coexist.
Argan oil, olives and olive oils from the Chiadma region, salt from the nearby Jebel Hadid mountain, cactus fruits, local grains, seasonal herbs, fruits and vegetables growing across the surrounding fields mark the untouched richness of the region.
Within this radius, 10KM reconstructs the fundamental pillars of taste: pomegranate molasses for sweetness, guava vinegar for acidity; fresh milk transformed into cheese, homemade harissa, brines, and sourdough bread made from regional flour with a levain cultivated at Ddar, all of which deepen the expressions of salt, bitterness, and umami. These micro-local transformations naturally produce flavours that are more direct and reminiscent of pre-modern and medieval cuisines.
When advanced technologies intersect with elemental forces—sunlight, water, nutrients, microbes, the dynamics of waves, and quantum scales—a different kind of singularity becomes imaginable: one defined by balance rather than acceleration, by exponential progress without rupture. It envisions a peaceful, intelligent future in which technology and nature operate together, and where the most advanced tools may be not only digital or engineered but also elemental.
The resulting meal of 10KM unfolded as a series of still-life compositions that explore how past and vernacular knowledge can outline soft forms of futurism. Captured by Moroccan photographer Iman Zaoin, it echoed the visual codes of online food culture while resonating with contemporary movements that value slow living, localism, real- life communities, and the material simplicity of everyday life.
Ben Elliot
10km, 2025.
Developed in collaboration with Saeda (Kaja Ludvigsen and Soufiane Lazrak) and Armin Tligui.
Commissioned by NG.
At DDAR, Essaouira, Morocco.
Photography Iman Zaoin