Kitchen Cultures (2020—) — Social Art Library

By

Kaajal Modi

Kitchen Cultures is a project that explores the knowledge of migrant women of colour in in the kitchen, and to develop new recipes to preserve and transform food in order to reduce food waste.

Stage 1 of the research project, which has been the process of recipe development with chef collaborator Fatima Tarkleman as part of the Eden Project residency at the Invisible Worlds exhibition, worked with six migrant women of colour from formerly colonised nations, and ran over six weeks from September to October 2020. These workshops were originally due to take place over summer in two community centres/kitchens in London and Bristol, but due to COVID-19 and the subsequent lockdown, we had to adapt the methodology and recruitment process to account for the changes.

We created an adaptive framework for working with my participants that was structured much like an online syllabus with weekly worksheets and activities to complete. Participants were required to commit to 1.5 a week on Zoom discussing their progress, and 2-3 hours total a week of their own time planning, researching or experimenting in their own kitchens. This became an iterative, emergent process that had feedback built into the weekly meetings/workshops, and a variety of supporting documentation, including videos, reading, and suggested activities, including sharing ingredients via post, and music via an online playlist.

Our participants were partnered up interculturally and intergenerationally, and they were invited to develop new hybrid preservation recipes that drew from their respective cultural influences. This culminated in a poetry workshop with Bristol-based Somali poet Asmaa Jama, where participants were coached through the process of writing a poem about themselves using food metaphors. All participants were paid for their time, and we were able to use some of the budget to provide them with a “Kitchen Kit”, consisting of some items that they could use to “test” their ferments, such as litmus paper, slides and a phone microscope), together with a “welcome/how-to” video.

We were further facilitated in our process by the Eden Project providing all of our participants, and myself and Fatima, a light ring and microphone to film ourselves working in the kitchen. I also created a set of questions that asked participants to answer about their relationship to food, climate, migration and colonisation, in their preferred format. We are still collating answers, recipes and poetry outcomes from the project, some of which were provided as audio and video. In the new year these will be developed into recipes kits and a recipe book which we will make a available for download, and an audio piece which will bring together some of the stories, poetry, recipes and other outcomes.

More information: instagram.com/our_kitchen_cultures

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Kaajal Modi

Kaajal Modi (she/they) is a multidisciplinary designer with a background in political visual communication, social and partipatory design and community-led food activism based on principles of critical care and mutual aid. Kaajal is currently conducting a practice-based PhD at the Digital Cultures Research Centre at UWE, Bristol, co-supervised through the Science Communication Unit. Their practice draws from collaborative design, speculative design, science communication and participatory art in order to build emergent methodologies that are inclusive, playful and exploratory. Through their research, they work with food fermentation practices in the kitchen as a way to explore our understandings of metabolic ecologies as extended through our bodies and our environments. They belive that by learning from and working with the knowledge, practices and cultural cosmologies of marginalised communities, in collaboration with the holders of that knowledge, we might find new ways of thinking climate futures where we all flourish.

kaajalmodi.com