Can the gut think? Is it possible to extract oil from lettuce? What would happen if we applied the tenets of brutalism to food—and why would we want to? These are just a few of the questions that came up earlier this fall when the artists Carsten Höller, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and Tobias Rehberger traveled to northern Sweden’s Jämtland province to visit MAGNUS NILSSON at his two-star Michelin restaurant, Fäviken. Located 200 miles south of the Arctic Circle, Fäviken is the 34-year-old chef’s ode to his wild environs—and the methods of food preparation required at that latitude. Nilsson cooks only with ingredients sourced from the restaurant’s 20,000-acre estate, with the exception of the beef that comes from a neighboring farm and the seafood caught off the nearby Norwegian coast.

All of the artists have made the pilgrimage to the restaurant before, booking months in advance to secure one of its 24 seats. Each is also known for producing works that explore how food and drink, and the spaces in which they are served, foster connections among people: Tiravanija hosts communal feasts of Thai food in galleries, once feeding tom kha soup to thousands of guests at Paris’s Grand Palais; Rehberger has designed dazzling geometric bars in New York and Venice; and the well-documented carnivore Höller once opened a part-Congolese, part-European art installation turned pop-up restaurant in London called the Double Club.

As a special treat for his friend Höller, who raises songbirds at his apartment in Stockholm, Nilsson prepared a nine-course meal with as many different species of bird. The fowl was seasoned only with salt.