14 Apr Kitchen Stories, 2018

Multi-sensory event. Cultural and artistic productions on nutrition, care and togetherness

This work is the first artistic collaboration hosted by Caro Quirán and Peter Haselmayer. The project is a multi-sensory happening, conceived and cooked in the studio and showroom of Walter Ego. It features different artistic contributions by guests who come from different cultural backgrounds and are acting from several artistic platforms, who were invited to submit an entry related to a special dish that reminded them of their childhood or their roots; like performative interventions, lectures/readings, installations and visual productions in tight relation to food and the way we sustain us. The non-temporal works were exhibited in the framework of the Urban Bloom Festivals Program in 2018.

Before we ever open our eyes to this world, we have a bunch of memories, sensorial approaches, epigenetics, making part of the formation of our material being. Emotions are as familiar to us as thoughts and are directly related. Our feelings are attached to the smell of the places we lived in, the smell of our kitchens and our favorite meals. There is a large part of our being and our memory that is interspersed with food. As we encounter ourselves going very often back to this basic feelings of nutrition, this work is an invitation to remember together the many ways food had connected us to ourselves and to others. We could even start of how we want to live together with the basic idea of how we imagine to nourish and care for ourselves. The focus of Kitchen Stories is how we inherited through nourishment the knowledge or better said, the wisdom for solidary economies.

Bell hooks once stated that every revolution started in the kitchen. Our grandma´s knew it too. Once there were women discussing and imagining, sharing and desiring a better future, planning revolutions and also having mutual resilience. The kitchen is still the potential quartier to knead the dough for social changes. It is a starting and endpoint to strengthen our bonds, our minds and our fates in a good living. It has always been for many, a place of common imaginations.

Photos: event documentation

Cooked and exhibited in Kitchen Stories in the Studio and Showroom at Kalvariengasse, Vienna, 2018.