cooking as rehearsal: meeting again

Prompted by the question How will we meet again?, posed to me back in mid-2020 by Gabriella Gómez-Mont and Antonio Vega Macotela, we were drawn through The Red Door Project into the shared task of exploring, with others, new ways of imagining and reuniting in a post-pandemic and racialised world.

Part of the project involved an expanded practice coming from the cultura ritual of the Mexican Sobremesas.

But what if, besides sharing meals and conversations, we started by cooking together? To commence by sharing the labor of preparing and producing collectively the conditions for nourishment and exchange. The communion may then begin by engaging in the collective endeavor, and the shared energy of working hand in hand, preparing the dishes to be eaten. This would organically fuel the stamina and slow-cooked chemistry: allowing for the sobremesa to unfold richly and to be collectively shared.

**Insertar: Video paneo FF_cocinando

Cooking to Learn, became an almost unnoticed but constant personal practice years ago, and was more recently shaped into an ongoing proposal which feeds this particular collaboration with Gabriella and Antonio, through the Red Door Project. Our conversation, which extended into March, 2022, suddenly aligned with the moment in which the Rijksakademie’s community of workers and residents returned to inhabiting the space publicly after the long, restrictive and uncertain period of the pandemic. Thus, cooking became an excuse to rehearse being physically together in space again. To retune and re-sync distances of encounters, of proximities, the listening and acknowledging, the presence of others. 

As a temporary guest into the Rijks ecosystem, an invitation to cook collectively became the excuse to perceive, think, and be-with several enthusiastic residents, workers and allies who joined the venture. 

Former Rijks’ resident Donghwan Kam – after a rich conversation around cooking and his own process of setting up a communal kitchen as part of his studio at Rijksakademie – offered to lend us his mobile kitchen structure. It had been recently hosted at BOOST for several workshops and community activities, and was later set up at Framer Framed as part of the exhibition and programming of Project: Do It Together- DIT: a kitchen / a tent / a learning playground / a workshop………… (1 Mar – 3 Apr, 2022). This naturally became the chosen site for the cooking and the gathering to take place. 

The rhythms involved in inviting the residents’ community, the Rijks’ staff, and specific guests to the session, strongly enhanced the sense of a rehearsal. The ongoing flu and covid outbreaks in Europe and the Netherlands, along with internal rearrangements, clearly showed the reality of navigating uncertainty and flexibility on a real-time basis… Openness, care and attention, along with disposition to the shape of the gathering on a day by day, hour by hour, basis. 

In this light, it became clear that Cooking to Learn would respond in fine emotional attunement to the flexible disposition of slow arrival, patience, and full presence. 

The process began by mapping possible food vendors close to the Rijksakademie neighbourhood, in Dappersmarkt. There, we found ingredients sourced from local farmers, international food stores and some local small-scale food initiatives. Thus, the ingredients brought directly from Mexico merged with what was available locally, and recipes were adapted to respond to the diverse nutritional requests from the participants. 

**Insertar: video Dappersmarkt

Cookingware and utensils were sourced: from a local airbnb, to the generous lending from the Rijks’ Cantina, the mobile Kitchen’s set, along with Framer Framed’s equipment, and some of their staff’s house supplies. Building the technical facilities was already a communal process. 

In the afternoon of March 3rd, 2022, we met at Framer Framed, and began organising the space into different cooking stations. We displayed ingredients, cooking ware, and started presenting the recipes on a whiteboard in the space, awaiting the organic arrival of the participants.

The Cooking Process

Sobremesa

Sobremesa-induced provocations:

• Undo institutional/professional/hierarchical performativity and representation
• Engage labor intensive, embodied acknowledgement of co-presence
• Organic and flowing conversations for open sharing (genealogies, territories, tricks and inherited or created connections to cooking)
• Self-led and self-organised production
• A very clear end: to share the meal, created for an extended pleasure
• Crafted yet never-fully-controlled balance between precision and organicity in the unfolding of time and process. There is a pre-planned structure: the ingredients, the utensils, the resources, the spaces… while the preparation of meals responds to a co-created rhythm, not previously rehearsed, nor strictly timed 
• Labor intensity
• Care and sustenance, invisibilized labor and processes, in relation to result-oriented regimes of visibility, value and productivity 
• Sharing previous knowledge while being surprised by improvisation, resolving issues in real time, responsiveness
• Both a relative dispersion of chat, talk, labour, and also fully present hands-on work and attentive engagement 
• It is clear that in the end the shared and distributed pleasure of it is worth it
• There is also, an excedent of energy, of the output of creative and collective work, of the potential of summed up energies
• Once we sit at the table, the nourishing, and the sobremesa starts, there is a concrete realisation of everyone’s hand and input in the pleasurable redistributed fruits of our work
• Even if it is  ‘just a gesture’, it is a micro political one
• A new embodied memory in a multisensory, multilayered, diverse and shared space/time
• We feed ourselves, and we are securely capable of feeding more than our own… 
• The most substantial and subtle traces, imprints of the experience may create registers of sorts, however they may also escape technical documentation… 

Credits: Images in this piece by Gabriella Gómez Mont, Sofía Olascoaga, Jim Van Geel