Stockholm, May 2015
Royal Technical University, Architecture School
THE LEFTOVER BANQUET: Cooking the Commons
Studio 8 celebrated the end of the Sao Paulo project with a saudade food experience at the school. Together Studio 8 and Pepe Dayaw cooked a collaborative event in the courtyard, The Leftover Banquet. The food was sourced from the surplus of Stockholm’s supply chain and the leftovers from people’s fridges. Lecture by Pepe while the cooking was happening, conversation towards issues on both sides: how people consume in their everyday lives, and also how our society is choreographed by surplus / excess.
Nowhere Kitchen is a concept of precarious architecture making that belongs only to the now and here. http://www.nowherekitchen.com/
More about Studio 8’s theme for the 2014-2015 academic year, “Shifting Ground” in the Studio Themes catalogue: httpa//issuu.com/…/kth…/docs/studio_themes_____kth_school_of_arc/25
a one-night only exhibition, guided tour and dance-dinner performance
Entretempo Kitchen Gallery
Photo: Mari Sierra
The earliest recorded use of the word ‘serendipity’ dates back to 18th century, when art historian Horace Walpole mentioned it in a letter, and was said to be derived from a Persian fairy tale ‘The Three Princes of Serendip’ who in the story “were always making discoveries, by accidents…of things they were not in quest of”. As in 1492, when a sailor named Cristobal Colon whose mission was to go to Japan through a route westward but instead wound up ‘lost’ in some islands he had no idea existed before and subsequently called it the ‘New World’. Almost 500 years later, one morning in 1989, a young boy in a small island in the Pacific woke up to find out that they had nothing left to eat and had to borrow three cups of rice from his neighbors. Later on he would fondly remember this event as an awakening to a whole ‘new world’. What connections lie among these narratives? Spice routes is as much an ongoing ethnography of unfinished journeys as it is an autobiography of those delicate states of grace so named serendipities. Through a choreography of ritual, storytelling, and cooking, Pepe dances along the fluid lines between the mundane and the spectacular to recook the past and relocate it in the realm of movement.
Accompanying this experience is a five-course menu composed of both recipes learned by Pepe through practice and also recent ‘accidental discoveries’ out of improvising with what is left.
MENU / ACTS
-home
-new world
-sirocco
-colonization
-memorial
We can live our lives as if it were the Spice Route… with no end in sight to fear nor to pursue, merely a constant cycle of expeditions and discoveries…
Se acerca el momento de elegir, el miedo o el hambre… – Maria Folguera
But couldn’t everyone’s life a work of art? Why should the lamp or house be an object, but not our life? – Michel Foucault
Stew :: a slow-cooked dish composed of several distinct spices and ingredients whose qualities dissolve, diffuse, merge and collaborate with others in the process of cooking with heat. What emerges is a well blended dish that has a taste and feeling of wholeness. In a stew, one does not know where a spice begins and ends, but one is conscious that it is there. It is a rounded, rhizomic experience.
Our modern historical narratives are marked by abstract frames or -isms: colonialism, imperialism, industrialism, fascism, capitalism etc. And while they have rhetorically made sense of an expanding universe of the past, there is little recognition of the relation of this sense to our sensual and embodied relationship with memories; memories that belong to the realm of experience and what we call the practice of everyday. What connection is there with how we choreograph our daily lives, how we approach the future, and how histories are created and eventually written? What democratic strategies are possible to re-write or re-member history, especially if some of them remain as painful memories, ones that we try to forget, or cause us to remain in conflict with ourselves or the other? Is there an opening outside the wheel or turns of archiving our past upon layers and layers of new abstract concepts on top of what are already in use, some with prefixes such as neo- and post-?
Spice Routes reflects at ways we remember and make history through the sensorial and ritualistic process of cooking. It is a practice of observing thousand year old migrations within everyday kitchens. On one hand, the philosophical route aims to map connections between established narratives of the past and more fluid, unstable processes of piecing memories together. On the other hand, it uses nomadic strategies to approach the uncertainty what has not happened yet, as a place one could inhabit where everyday becomes a quest for discovery. Through enacting contemporary social ethnographies starting with cooking experiences, the creation of spice routes serve as edible experiments in collaborative improvisations of producing rituals and a sense of ‘nowness’ that re-seasons the past, creating ‘umami’ sensations as an invitation to renew our remembrances. The stew is a symbolic ritual object of the spice route, it is the meeting place. The ‘cooking process’ that becomes open to participation imbues a sensuality of emergency and play to both how we cook a present that is always fugitive and to the past that will never be again other than renewed creative representations. Spice routes embark on a poetic itinerary into the multiple layers of our awareness of reality, fusing the collective and individual, the fictive and the real into an informal atmosphere where something else could emerge yet is open-ended. It reconciles grand Historical frames with our micropolitical heterologies. It could take place anywhere and the maps created are live, unstable, inclusive and embodied. It is inspired by the legendary Silk Route / Spice Trade, a both imagined and real historical series of routes that birthed colonialisms and connected the so-called east and west. This nomadic route lives on, history is invited to happen as a rhizome of relations, accidents, and serendipities. It is not yet, but can always be, always open-ended, subject to change. There is no conclusion, it does not belong to our time.
The project is DIY-designed research and learning process that will be facilitated and made possible through a fluid network of encounters, collaborations, sontaminations, friendships, making-a-living and a continuous exchange of creative economy. The itinerary is in itself a time scultpure, a way of framing the emergent or a mapping of organic encounters and serendipities that sees the choreography of weaving connections and making something with what is already there.
Image: Spicy Histories, guided tour performance at the B-Tour, Belgrade International Theatre Festival, September 2014. A part of the tour consisted of guiding a group of people and navigating into a marketplace with their eyes closed.
Queridos amig@s,
El lunes que viene, 1º de diciembre, celebro mi cumpleaños nº 33 de esta vida. Ultimamente no doy mucha importancia a esa fecha, pero esta vez quería hacerlo como un pretexto para reconectar con vosotros y con el barrio de mi corazón. Os invito a compartir una serie de rituales comestibles y melódicos.
¡Venid con hambre!
Un abrazo fuerte,
Pepe
20h – 21h, Espacio B, Calle Buenavista 39
I. The Insider, episodio 1. La Danza de lo Ilegible
una acción de mi amigo / poeta Ernesto Estrella Cózar
Nos adentramos en la mente de un agente de aduanas quien, al poco tiempo de jubilarse, comienza a ser invadido por los recuerdos y experiencias de las personas que pasaban delante suya mientras estaba de servicio. Un viaje que nos hace cruzar el magma de diferentes culturas mientras nos acerca a los detalles mínimos de una historia personal atravesada por acentos e historias ajenas, que se desintegran y se vuelven a entrelazar en los distintos episodios de la serie. Preciso y voraz, el Insider interviene en el ADN cultural de nuestros tiempo y nos presenta con una identidad nómada, fiel al pulso multiple de nuestro ser y estar diarios. Una búsqueda que guía a los asistentes a través de diversas rutas que confluyen no un terreno definido, sino en una comunidad en un nosotros por hacer.
Episodio I
Danza de lo Ilegible
Solo un par de años después de su jubilación, el Insider se ve afectado por problemas de escucha y comprensión. Otros idiomas, otra sonidos, emociones ajenas aparecen en sus libros, en sus recuerdos, en su vida diaria. En un intento por combatir esta perdida identitaria, decide volver a la danza, disciplina que había practicado durante su niñez y adolescencia. De todos modos, también ahi se encuentra con que sus movimientos le están siendo arrebatados por gestos y cuerpos ajenos.
II. Estofado Express: Made in Lavapies! Pepe cocina su historia de Brasil, España y Filipinas
MENU Berenjena y otras verduras de temporada en una salsa de leche de coco, manioc y naranja (vegetariana)
o,
Pollo con jamon iberico cocido en ajos, salsa soja, vinagre de sidra y laurel
Viene todo con: Arroz con curcuma fresca ensalada alineada de vinagreta de cilantro y tamarindo croquetas con salsa de cacahuete y chocolate
y unas historias de la ruta de especias de Pepe
Pepe va a preparar mas o menos 33 menus, y con eso nos apañamos.
III. After Dark My Sweet Licor sonoro-digestivo para el final de la noche. (Al remo, Ernesto Estrella; a la lumbre, Carlos Estrella, Pepe Dayaw, etc…)
Nos acercamos a una una isla a la cual han ido llegando restos de poesía, música, palabra hablada, provenientes de distintas costas: bossa-nova, swing, flamenco, música folklórica, etc. Todo este material llega a la costa y se le ofrece al público desde una frecuencia cálida, como la que acompaña al movimiento de acariciar o compartir la comida con alguien que te ha sido cercano. Músicos y poetas invitados se unen a las aguas de esta isla según progresa la noche.
ENTRADA GRATUITA Salida negociable 😉 Sugerimos una contribución de 6 euros para la comida y lo que queréis aportar para las acciones y música Si no teneis ningun duro 😉 ya pensais de algun intercambio
Caique and Pepe
15 January 7pm | Agora Collective, Mittelweg 50
The word ‘saudade’ first appeared as text in 13th century Galician-Portuguese anthology of poems called cancioneiros, more than 200 years before the first Portuguese men arrived in what is now Brazil. In the 1950s, a poem called ‘Chega de Saudade’ written by Vinicius de Moraes and composed by Antonio Carlos Jobim became a popular song that pioneered the bossa nova genre. Half a century later, a young man from Manila memorized this song without necessarily speaking Portuguese, mimicking the words and following its melody.
This series of events is bound and made possible mainly by one thing: water. Water is what separate lands, creates saudade feelings, and makes colonization possible. Two artists, one grew up in Sao Paolo, and the other in Manila make ‘sense’ of these fluid connections and other things that unite two of the largest metropolises in the world. It happens in one table. Through the interplay of their own micro-histories, they cook the colonial, the indigenous and everything else in between through a choreographic recipe that can only be described as ‘anthropofagia’.
The performance is a continuation of an artistic conversation between Caique Tizzi and Pepe Dayaw, who met each other in Berlin through the Agora Collective art platform. Some of the proceeds of the event goes to a symbolic fund for the artists’ current researches: SWEET (Tizzi) and A KARAOKE PROJECT (Dayaw)
MENU
plantain with spicy mango chutney, avocado and crunchy prosciutto
seabass cooked in a reduction of cider vinegar, ginger, garlic and coriander
cauliflower coconut puree, steamed tapioca
chicken and chestnut in chilli chocolate curry
pickled grapes in a tamarind base and turmeric rice
dulce de leche chilli lime and yoghurt cream
steamed cassava cakes with grated coconut
Donation:
30 € (a glass of wine is included)
Please reserve your places by writing to cookingnomad@gmail.com
Agora Collective: Foreplay #04 Daniel AlmgrenRecén with Pepe Dayaw
The primary intention of the performance series, Foreplay , is to create proximity between the audience and the work of the performer/choreographer through an encounter of the public with the artist’s universe, in the format of a dinner that happens prior to the performance. This dinner is a carefully prepared situation designed collaboratively by the artist and one of Agora Food‘s chefs (Agora’s new food platform, that supports 7 different chefs). This food experience is the opportunity for the artist to approach his/her work in a new format, re-articulating it into the language of taste, texture and dynamics.
This Program was conceptualized by Agora Collective, but is a continuous collaboration between the collective, the chefs, the artists and the public.
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“Walking home” / A set of dishes that brings Pepe back to an edible sense of home, an experience that he can share with everybody, in effect creating a room for a possible ‘us’ to take place.
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“Cooking our connections” / A half cooked second you and the others decide on its final taste, beginning with Daniels’ s and Pepe’s chosen sets of ingredients, and mixed with your own spicy memories.
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“A sweet ode to death” / Autumn… a time to remember what is not there anymore. An homage to the human capacity to create and weave memories… of home and beyond.
“Se acerca el momento de elegir: el miedo o el hambre”
(The moment to choose has come: fear or hunger)
– Maria Folguera, El amor y el trabajo, 2012, p.52
Hunger is a physical state that has the capacity to put our attention to our body and focus on the weight of an immediately present situation: the desire to eat. This desire creates a hyperlocal sphere of time and space that is limited to satisfying it. When used creatively, this state brings about a set rituals of searching for and/or making food that can bring people together. Once hunger is satisfied and / or have been celebrated, it is possible to create other rituals and other states. Our living narratives begin from how we satisfy our basic living necessity.
Spicy Histories remembers the ritualistic, ceremonious and social conditions of a basic human act that has since belonged to the everyday, the mundane and the sedentary. By transposing it as an event where one travels from one place to another, the artist invites the people to participate in a woven set of edible narratives that, in an attempt to tell a story of a city, tries to cook together an ephemeral community.
Foodleft Series: ‘A Social Stew’
A Last Meal at the Oxford Symposium of Food and Cookery
St. Catherine’s College, Oxford University, UK
July 13, 2014
Leftovers from previous meals were accumulated and prepared four hours before the lunch. It was served through a procession led by a trumpeter playing a New Orleans funeral march, followed by around a dozen chefs and around two dozen staff working with the college. A rice ritual honoring food artist Alicia Rios preceded.
Collaborating chefs: Tim, head chef at St. Catherine’s College, Keelin, Eve, and the chefs of St. Catherine.
Film and Images: Joe and Bonny
Acknowledgements: Ursula, Elisabeth, Trine, Monica
Printed menu design: Jake Tilson
Vimeo by: Bonnie
About Nowhere Island The Island is Nowhere Kitchen’s itinerant practice of installing live kitchen environments as a means of not only occupying an already existing context, but also collaborating to catalyze them. A state of ritualistic improvisation takes place where elements found in-situ are used to cook a given situation. The rituals that surround the cooking and eating meal create an ephemeral state of community that is specific only to the moment. It belongs to no other time but now. Dishes belong to no other places but here. It is an ‘island’ that generate a tribe in-situ and situates local desires to collaborate to weave other possible futures.
#01. Agora: Affect International Residency Launch Agora Collective – Neukolln, Berlin. March 15, 2014 with Ayumi Masa Saito
#02. Transnationality and Translinguality // Brunch Month of Performance Art – Berlin Ding Dong Dom, Das Theater der Zukunft. May 03, 2014 with Ayumi Saito, Marie Capesius and Alex Shure
#03. Berlin Diagonale // Theatertreffen 2014 Independent Performing Arts Made in Berlin Ding Dong Dom, Das Theater der Zukunft, Holzmarkt 25. May 06, 2014 with Ayumi Saito, Marie Capesius and Alex Shure
#04. Inhabiting Dispersion // Archive of Affects Espacio B (in partnership with the Museum of Reina Sofia) Lavapies, Madrid. May 16, 2014
#05. We-Traders Berlin Exhibition – Opening Kunstraum Bethanien – Kreuzberg. July 6, 2014 performance with Marie Capesius
#06. Food Assembly London Launch Event 90 Mainyard Bar and Restaurant. July 15, 2014 with Roberta Siao
#05. We-Traders Berlin Exhibition – Opening
Organic vegetables in season from a local Berlin farm, rice noodles, tempeh wrapped in fresh summer rice paper topped with rhubarb peanut sauce. Eaten by hand.
Photos: Javier Duero Mobile kitchen provided by Gartenstudio
