Street vending exhibition
Mattmo was part of the concept team for Street Food City, a major exhibition by the Museum of Food and Drink (MOFAD) in New York. The exhibition explores how immigrant street food vendors have shaped New York City’s culinary identity, public space, and everyday culture — from historic pushcarts to contemporary food trucks, and from informal economies to political activism.
Street Food City reveals the often unseen world behind the cart: stories of migration, family businesses, night shifts, regulation, and resilience. It positions street vending not only as food culture, but as a lens through which to understand urban life, labor, and belonging.
In close dialogue with MOFAD’s curatorial team, Mattmo contributed to the early conceptual framework of the exhibition. Our focus was on how storytelling, multimedia, and sensory design could translate lived experience into a museum context — creating an exhibition that feels human, layered, and immersive rather than purely informational.
We helped explore narrative approaches that prioritize voices over facts, intimacy over spectacle, and reflection over explanation. Concepts included audio-driven storytelling, video portraits from the vendor’s point of view, interactive city mapping, and participatory elements that invite visitors to connect their own food memories to the broader story of street vending. Sensory layers — sound, image, smell, and taste — were considered as key tools to evoke the rhythm, density, and poetry of the street.
A central theme in our contribution was extending the exhibition beyond the museum walls: imagining street carts as communication platforms, digital tools that connect the exhibition to the city, and participatory formats that allow the public to engage with street food culture in real urban space.
Through this work, Mattmo supported MOFAD’s mission to present food as culture — highlighting street vendors as cultural agents who continuously shape the city, its flavors, and its social fabric.
