Municipal Kitchen
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Format: exhibition and publication
Budget: 64.772,50 € (project: 56.225,00 € ; publication: 8.497,50 €)
Municipal Kitchen is a collective exhibition project accompanied by weekly free-of-charge community meals and events concerned with the politics of food in urban space. Understanding this to be both a deeply feminist and a public issue, it will ask: what would it mean to dedomesticate the kitchen and de-privatise the labour involved in food preparation, to make healthy, sustainable food a public issue and a communal service?
The programme will engage with the history of the site, a former fast food restaurant, located in a major centre of commercial consumption. Rather than make ethical judgments about fast food or global franchises, it will consider the emancipatory potential of this space. A central “kitchentable” in the exhibition space will host communal meals, discussions and events connecting international struggles and inspiring local action. The table will transform week on week to connect to artworks developed in close collaboration with a wider community of local and international food artists and collectives, supported by a Community Food Curator. Each art practitioner will be invited to work with an existing community organisation, creating a cumulative engagement with questions of the ethics and justice of food production, distribution, food as a commons, private and public cooking and eating, communal support structures, and the notion of (universal) basic services. In the process, new trans-disciplinary and international dialogues and solidarities will be sparked.
In weekly events, artists will host workshops shaped around the role of food in their respective art practices. Accompanying free-of-charge communal meals will be realised collaboratively with Berlin-based food justice organisations, who will also co-facilitate talks/discussions. The sharing of food will be facilitated in such a way that it allows interaction of a wide range of participants, generating creative energy and connections that will develop a legacy network and long term collaborations. We will prioritise reaching people who do not typically engage with art spaces in the city, for instance by working with food banks operating on Alexanderplatz. A publication, to be jointly developed with exhibiting artists and collaborating organisations over the period of the exhibition, will bundle key discussions, findings, and contributions on the role art can play in creating an appetite for new ideas around communal food politics.
