Eating Together

as Community-based Artist and Researcher

Nov 2018 - Jul 2019

In 2019, I presented the collaborative paper titled "Artistic Inquiry in the Making – Experiences From a Nordic Doctoral Course Performing Research in a Local Setting" at the "MAKING | INSEA 2019" conference held at the University of British Columbia, Canada. Alongside the oral presentation, I performed "Eating Together: A Reflection About Togetherness Through Cooking a Soup," which explored the theme of communal experience. I served as both performer and author for this interdisciplinary work.

This was the recited text at the conference while warming a soup I had cooked in the hotel room hours before:

From deciding what to cook to cleaning the dishes after a meal, there’s an in-between process that involves an underrated form of togetherness.

Coming from a Southern European cultural background, I acknowledge that cooking has significant meaning for me as a vehicle for social engagement. It has also been a tool for my practice as a community-engaged artist.

What I bring you here today are short reflections and memories from an activity during this course.

Tuesday night.

It starts to snow, and we are trying to cook a big pot of soup at an unsheltered small harbor close to a residential area in Kristiansand, Norway. The dynamics of that night made me realize that all my thoughts had shapeshifted into something completely different from that moment onwards, concerning the existing and upcoming dynamics of our group.

But what makes this group, a group? And what’s the relation of it with an artistic practice based in togetherness? Claire Bishop in "Artificial Hells" (2012, pp. 77–78) gives us an example of it: the Surrealists provoked the assembly of groups through nonsense tours, as a way of grasping the community sense, experiencing together something as a collective performance, and at the same time putting it together.

On the other instance, John Ahearn’s projects (Russeth, 2012) had another perspective, by questioning the community from the inside out about what was bonding it. It’s interesting to think about how both approaches relate, even though the reactions from the participants were the opposite.

During the process of soup making, I thought about what Eliane Moraes described in her reflections on the act of Living Together from the 27th Biennal de São Paulo, (2006, pp. 206–210), as “castaways at the shore.” The synergy among the group was in motion. Conflict arose.

Olive oil, onion, garlic, carrots, potatoes, lentils, and bay leaf… the basis of Mediterranean cuisine. While our bodies were performing with knives, wooden spoons, and hot pots, conversations emerged around the struggling camping stove, constantly fighting against the wind. It started to smell like home. The heat generated by the process gathered us around the big pot. Parallel conversations emerged, sharing spoken images of memories that would take us away from that cold, or at least distracted the mind from it.

While stirring the soup, there was a group interlacing a camping mat through their legs, making a windshield so the fire wouldn’t be put out. The cold, the discomfort of being outdoors on a winter night, increased functionality and organization throughout the process of making that soup. The roles of professors and students were deconstructed; the dialogue was more open. The primal need to feel warm and feed ourselves brought us together, even if just for some moments.

Eating that soup was the culminating act of the process. The synergy was there. The sharing of stories continued until everyone was full. My ending thoughts go into the importance of how rituals like this are getting lost, or just being substituted by new ones. Because sometimes, to think about togetherness, we just need to gather and make a soup.