Who’s Cooking (for Whom)?
Who’s Cooking (for Whom)?
A food performance and public conversation on how the design of a kitchen can shape and transform the relationship between host and guest.
Who is cooking for whom? Who is the host, and who is the guest?
As part of The House for Collective Imagination*, Globe Aroma invites you to Who’s Cooking (for Whom)?, a participatory dinner and public conversation exploring the design of its new kitchen through questions of hospitality and shared ownership.
The dinner is part of a longer co-creative process around the design of Globe Aroma’s new kitchen. Since March 2026, weekly community lunches at Globe Aroma have brought people together to experiment with different ways of hosting, sharing food and making others feel welcome. These experiences raise questions about how a kitchen can accommodate different ways of using and sharing a space: from cooking a meal for yourself or inviting friends over for dinner, to preparing collective meals or welcoming an audience during public events.
But who is cooking for whom? Who serves the food, and who is being served? Who has paid to be here, and who hasn’t? Who speaks to whom? And what do these different roles tell us about hospitality? During this participatory dinner, we invite you to explore these questions through the experience of sharing a meal. Rather than simply attending a food performance, you will take an active part in it. Upon arrival, each participant will be assigned a role, inviting everyone to experience how the relationships between host and guest can shift depending on how a meal is organised.
The evening also includes a public conversation looking back at Globe Aroma’s history of food performances and shared meals. In conversation with artists and members of the Globe Aroma community who have organised food performances or shared meals in the past, we will explore how food, art and spatial design can open up alternative ways of practising hospitality. From these experiences, we will look ahead: what does a community kitchen need in order to encourage shared ownership and make room for different ways of being together?
Come hungry, curious, and ready to take part.
Programme
- 18:00: Welcome
- 18:30–19:30: Public conversation
- 19:30–21:00: Collective food performance or is it a shared meal?
- 21:00: music programme
Would you like to help prepare the meal? Audience members interested in joining the cooking team are invited to contact heleen@globearoma.be
*The House for Collective Imagination is Globe Aroma’s infrastructural vision for the future. It consists of the desire to become a small-scale and shared place in Brussels’ city centre where people in displacement come together to access various services (such as art, social and legal assistance, housing, etc.) that allow them to build a sense of belonging and establish forms of artistic citizenship beyond legal status. This vision is supported through a collective design process for the renovation of Globe Aroma’s building that starts by questioning the norms and practices that typically shape the rooms of a public building. Through co-creative processes focused on specific places, such as the door, the toilet, the kitchen, or the reception area, Globe Aroma reflects across cultures, bodies, and gender identities on who belongs and who is excluded, what it means to belong somewhere, and how this can take shape through collective imagination.