Ottonie von Roeder
Experimental designer and educator based in Leipzig, Germany.
Her practice creates fictional institutions, participatory infrastructures, and speculative services through which alternative social, ecological, and technological futures can be collectively imagined, prototyped and inhabited.
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WorkSSelected Works
Viennese Caviar goes Vegan
Home Tours
Post-Labouratory
Cow&Co
Motel win-win
Inside-Out
La Grande Transformation
Dream Factory
Selected Teaching
2022 Jelly World, Die Angwandte Vienna
2020/21 Find a Fact & Act, UdK Berlin
2017 - 2020 Bauhaus Agenten, Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau
2018/19 New Grounds - Neue Gründe, UdK Berlin
website currently under construction
Viennese Caviar goes Vegan
Collaboration with Anastasia Eggers
Vienna Biennale for Change 2021
Viennese Caviar goes Vegan offers a sustainable take on a historically exclusive delicacy, redefining luxury by transforming invasive, edible underwater plants from Vienna's Old Danube into a premium, fish-friendly alternative.
The project questions the extractive histories and cultural value associated with caviar by proposing a local, plant-based reinterpretation of a product traditionally defined by rarity, import, and the exploitation of natural resources. Every year, the City of Vienna removes approximately 2,600 tons of invasive aquatic plants from the Old Danube to keep its waterways accessible for swimming and boating. Rather than treating this biomass as waste, the project explores its culinary potential by transforming the edible invasive plant Myriophyllum spicatum into vegan caviar.
On spot it began with a collective harvesting action at the Old Danube, where participants gathered Myriophyllum spicatum before taking part in a public cooking show to prepare the first batches of vegan caviar. This hands-on process became the starting point for conversations about urban ecologies, food cultures, and the ways value is assigned to natural resources.
Building on this initial intervention, the project evolved into a series of cooking and shared dining events that brought together practitioners and experts from the fields of caviar production, vegan seafood development, sterlet conservation, material research, and speculative luxury design. Rather than presenting a finished solution, Viennese Caviar goes Vegan employs harvesting, cooking, and eating as formats for collective inquiry, inviting participants to reflect on sustainability, local production, ecological restoration, and the future of luxury. Throughout the project, no fish are harmed.
Viennese Caviar goes Vegan was developed as part of the EAT LOVE programme for the Vienna Biennale for Change 2021, curated by Urban Think Tank and supported by the Vienna Business Agency.
Further project partner: Vienna Design Week, Stadt Wien, Alpenkaviar, Life Sterlet Project Vienna, Institute of Chemistry of Renewable Resources BOKU Vienna, Thomas Pausz, Revo Foods
Photos partly by Klearjos Eduardo Papanicolaou / © Urbanthinktank_next (Hubert Klumpner and Michael Walczak)