Part of “Where is the Meal?” Event series.
This event explores temporal and situative community building through meals. Many meals take place in settings that are neither private households, nor restaurants or commercial spaces. Such settings may be community kitchens, neighbourhood meals or part of art projects. They provide unique opportunities for bringing people together, but they also operate in spaces that are difficult to classify and defy easy categorizations.
Legally, such spaces fall into a regulatory no-man’s land, where they exist between the strict regulations of commercial kitchens and the lax rules of private meals. Socially, such meals create a group of eaters that straddles the borders of a private event, being a guest with expectations of a formal event and, oftentimes, a participant or audience of a performance. They also invite people that can have much or very little in common to the intimate experience of sharing food. Temporally, such meals are fleeting, but organized: They need to create their participants and audiences, but often disappear quickly.
What are the tensions that emerge when running a community kitchen, allotment or garden in a cultural or educational institution? The event will address these issues through the setting of a temporary meal with two guests, who both share with us their rich experiences in creating such meals and other community food ventures.
Date & Location
19 March 2024, 5-8pm at Goldsmiths, University of London. The event will take place at the Goldsmiths Allotment outside the Department of Anthropology. If it rains, it will be relocated to RHB 150.
Register
Please book a Free ticket for the event via the TicketSource event page.
Guests
Marina Monsonís is a visual artist who works with hybrid and heterogeneous processes of social transformation rooted in territories, in collective, community and pedagogical projects that relate marine sciences, place-based design, gastronomy, graffiti, radical geography, ethnography and critical, oral and gestural memory. She works on projects that connect the kitchen with political, critical, social and transgenerational aspects to create debates and transmit knowledge about the complexities and conflicts that inhabit km 0. She has directed The Kitchen at The Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona (MACBA) since it began in November 2018.
Ros Gray is Reader in Fine Art, Critical Studies and Programme Director of the MA Art & Ecology. Her research and teaching often involves collaborations with artists, scientists and activists, addressing ecological emergency with an emphasis on climate justice. Coming to ecology from a background researching militant filmmaking, she is interested in decolonial, eco-feminist and queer approaches to ecological stewardship. Ros has coordinated the Goldsmiths Allotment since 2016 and is currently leading the development of the Art Research Garden and Laboratory. She is on the Editorial Board of Third Text and is co-commissioning editor of the Goldsmiths Press book series Planetarities.
More info
This event is part of “Where is the Meal? A Roving and Participatory Event Series on Food, Place and Communities. “Where is the Meal? is a series of five events responding to the question of how meals relate to place, and its cultural, political, technological and legal conditions. Each event is comprised of a meal for all participants, designed collaboratively by the event organisers and two invited guests at different places in London. Each individual event serves to both perform the topic of the meal, and engage the guests and audience into a relevant discussion.
