The Leftover Banquet
Studio 8 has been working in the Sao Paulo city centre, on architectural projects as urban incisions, precise interventions in the city fabric that reach beyond its immediate site and contest conventions on sustainable practices, borders of public and private, public space, spatial segregation, gentrification and social justice.
Artist Pepe Dayaw's performance involves cooking leftovers for different people with his research node Nowhere Kitchen:
According to etymology, the earliest use in English of the word ‘leftover’ referring to excess food was from 1878. The context of its use coincided with progressive forms of food storage industrialisation (i.e. invention of the fridge, then tupperware, then seram wrap, then microwave, then doggy bag) that manufactured public excuses to routinise choreographies of consumption and its other: waste. Today, ‘leftover’ is assigned as a (generally pejorative) value to food that we have failed or forgotten to eat. Hence, its notion has become a semiotic by-product of modern time appropriated by current and still dominant modes of neo-liberal capitalism. While it is still part of contemporary everyday life, the culture of leftover and its cooking are considered mundane, often invisible and ignored; yet they can also be peripheral documents of our persisting malaise with the processes of production that has gotten out-of-hand. In rural areas where people are more in touch with the processes of food making, leftover does not really exist, or it is simply all there is. In this global age of transition that cries out for solutions against crises of excesses (i.e. consumerism, passive spectatorship) that our previous paradigms have firmly established, how can a practice as simple as the renewal of perspectives towards ‘leftovers’ be a pretext for rehearsing sustainable and micro-political modalities of democracy and knowledge production? Through an emergent process of cooking (leftovers) that relies on the basic philosophy of learning by doing and making something with what is already there, this research sets out to create nomadic (now/here) kitchens as a discursive design platform where both the practice and theory of cooking-as artistic research could be tried, developed and reflected in order to create renewed thresholds of knowledge.
SEMINAR (the lecture and the workshop go hand in hand)
Studio 8 students 13:00 to 15:00
a) lecture/concert:
Slow-cooked democracyIn this story-telling discussion, I share my experiences of Food Left project, and how the micro-political kitchen processes of cooking other people's leftovers translated into artistic explorations from which to enact contemporary folklores, precarious technologies and social architectures that opened up to new collaborations and serendipities with possibly macro-political outcomes.
b) workshop:
Recipes for cooking without Recipes These practical experiments synthesise leftover cooking learnings into a sensorial toolkit that emphasizes 'learning by doing' and inhabiting states of uncertainty. We live in a regime of sight and imagination where visual memory has become our habitual place of reference. How is it to occupy the threshold that is beyond what the eyes could see? How is it to betray our memory? How to use the notion of limit to alter our perception of what is there? It is a one--of-a-kind cooking workshop that gathers exercises of embodied thinking, improvisational design and developing one's intuition. Setting up the 'nowhere kitchen' in the KTH Architecture courtyard.
THE LEFTOVER BANQUET: Cooking the Commons
Guests and their leftovers 26th May from 16:00 –
KTH Architecture Courtyard
(Please bring your leftovers!)
Together Studio 8 and Pepe Dayaw will be cooking a collaborative event in the courtyard. The food will be sourced from the surplus of Stockholm’s supply chain and the leftovers of your fridge.
16:00 Guests arrive, bringing their leftovers to the kitchen and Pepe gives a lecture while cooking is already happening, we will curate the conversation towards issues on both sides: how people consume in their everyday lives, and also how our society is choreographed by surplus / excess.
DJ Dharma Bum is playing a special music selection.