Cuisine des subalternes
Cuisine des subalternes : an experimental and collaborative artistic research on food, cookery and colonization.
Globe Aroma opens its kitchen and hosts a series of experimental and collaborative workshops as part of the Cuisine of the Subalterns project.
Cuisine des subalternes is an artistic and activist project by Ichraf Nasri, supported by the Xeno- collective. It’s a series of experimental and collaborative workshops where we invite people from immigrant and exile backgrounds to prepare traditional recipes together.
The workshops of Cuisine des subalternes are both:
- circles of discussion and mutual aid for participants.
- a research setup to collect testimonies that will result in a publication.
The research explores how the circulation of food and culinary practices can either reinforce or challenge the postcolonial social order, engaging and practicing with Tunisian housewives (including my family), culinary professionals, farmers, merchants… We examine commensality as a collective and ritualized performance. We approach traditions as potential strategies of resistance. Food sovereignty is an integral part of emancipation, and bread is a symbol of struggle.
Through collaborative culinary workshops, we analyze through practice how iconic dishes have adapted; we invent alternative futures/presents for lost dishes; we address shortcomings and deprivations; we consider culinary gestures and techniques, as well as the places and rhythms of conviviality in a living research process.
The aim is to move away from Eurocentric epistemological patterns by giving credit to other ontologies. With the study field being the kitchen, the foods themselves serve as mediation between me and the interlocutors.
The workshops will take place every Tuesday until June 18th from 10am to 2pm and are reserved for people invited by Ichraf Nasri and the Globe Aroma community.
Picture: Ichraf Nasri, Olive harvest meal in Henchir Lksour, my grandfather’s land (northern Tunisia), 2023