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Forista: Tasting Notes

Becky Lyon
14 Oct 2025

Commissioned for the Brent Biennial 2025, Forista is an experimental project by artist Becky Lyon, which uses the typology of a cafe to connect guests with local-planetary soils, airs, and waters through the sensory arts of sipping, munching, and sniffing. 

Forista connects with edible, olfactory, and tactile earthly materials as a method of finding a shared palette across the vibrant and diverse diaspora of Brent, which speaks 157 languages and where Becky is a local, whilst honouring the importance of conviviality, hospitality, food culture, and grassroots growing in the borough as forms of solidarity and resistance. The format of the cafe and ‘coffee break’ was crafted as a moment of rest, personal-collective ritual, sensory re/attunement and delight to be rediscovered in everyday actions amidst systems that would otherwise sever and dominate our natural rhythms and our relationship to the land and each other. 

The curated ‘soil tasting’ menu was designed to unearth the sociality of soil and its extensive and extraordinary interspecies, inter-elemental connections; to taste geographies and climates through flavour and mouthfeel; and to invite participants to reflect on relationships to place, both healing and harming, through tactile and bodily interaction.

Where access to nature is unevenly distributed and desired differently, attending closely to eating and tasting, whatever ‘it’ is and wherever ‘we’ are becomes a potent method for recognising the multivarious ways we are always-already coming into contact with planetary ecologies and its politics. Likewise, it can create a contact point for those who are tasked to take care of nature and are perhaps not accessing nature enough, making high stakes decisions about it from a distance behind the screen and ‘all in the mind’. 

Forista was designed as a vessel to convene and converse around the often invisiblised ‘places’ on our plate – from coffee beans sourced from across the globe and roasted around-the-corner, to plants picked and turned into sippable perfumes and cookies ‘composted’ from the backs of our multi-cultured cupboards.

The name ‘Forista’ is a hybrid of ‘forest’ and ‘barista’ and reflects Becky’s secret, nearly-fulfilled wish to have a pop up coffee and cake stand in the forest during her frequent long walks in London’s secret spaces.

For the Brent Biennial, four different experiences were devised. Commissioned for Ibraaz Publishing, this version of Forista takes you through a specially crafted online coffee break via ‘tasting notes’ of the places-on-the-plate.

Tasting Notes

Travel to the Eratoi region of Timor-Leste via Cricklewood Coffee Roasters, Brent’s neighbourhood roaster. 

Inhale-taste the gourmand date-cinnamon-toffee aromas conjured from family farms on this small island nation, formerly colonised by Portugal and Indonesia, fringed by corals where coffee cherries mature in the forgiving coolth of tree cover.  

As you sip, can you taste the sweetshade in the understory of this dark liquor, crowned by thick crema and mellowed with made-in-Sweden-but-oat-origins-unknown, Oatly?

As an accompaniment, enjoy a refreshing cold tonic made of linden blossom, wild rose, and elderflowers steeped in Affinity Water tap water. (Location of the Affinity Water plant unknown – why is it called a plant?)

These are served as frozen, thung-numbing-sticking flower-shaped crystals blueified with pea flower blossoms brought back from Thailand.

The barely perceptible floral fragrance is a droning midtone as the crystals slow-weep in the 25-degree heat.

With a high note splash of citric acid (lemon, Sicily), these azureish blue botanical crystals slowly vibrate with violent violet.

This shapeshifting embodies Brent’s – old English: ‘sacred waters’ – waters which are no longer so sacred, and dangerously defiled with sewage and other pollutants. Tangy, astringent, it *catches* on the *thung*.

A thermochromatic coaster records the cold-hot shapeshifting. The shock of a cup-sized climate change…

A hummusy-brown cluster nestles nest-like, sweating-too-fast in window heat, mark-making fingers and mushes.

It embodies multiple-multi-origins-unknown crafted from stray biscuits, crackers, crisps, wafers, left-over Christmas chocolate and corner shop finds.

It represents the many-voiced of Brent as well as the global extents we go for a sweet treat:rose mallows from Romania, Turkish figs, a giant leftover pistachio pocky stick from Gwangju, English rich tea biscuits, vinegar Doritos amongst other at-odds things.

Estranged from their shimmer-pop wrappings they become part of an amorphous, unintelligible sociable-like-soil of chewy, scratchy, foamy, tangy, nutten, candied, gravelliness.

Held tight enough together in Green & Blacks 80% dark (Ghana) and hardy Waitrose Bran Flakes (origin unknown) atop a potato-starch edible paper (potato origin unknown).

New high and low notes sing out from the Timor-Leste.

Edible chocolate rocks in soil-stone colours, picked up from an Indian-run convenience store in Uganda brings us back down to somewhere that isn’t quite Earth…

The serving tray is lined with spent-soil from my garden (Colindale, soil origins unknown). You are invited to take the little brush and dig a little deeper to encounter the underwaters of the Brent Reservoir….yet to daylight.

We close with lungfuls of breath, steeping a tea bag of said spent soil in hot water, allowing that distinctive pyraziney aroma (the warmed must scent of wet earth, potato peelings and hazelnuts) to balm and ground us.

Finally, a few charms of shared connection. Collectible stickers, badges; tasting notes signal a shared experience.

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