Thursday 29 September 2022

Safiya Robinson is a creative cook, writer, wellness advocate and the founder of sisterwoman vegan, a plant-based social enterprise exploring wellness through food. A creative and vibrational cook, she creates plant-based dishes inspired by her Black American, Jamaican and British heritage and believes that food is a healing modality, centring community, education and mindfulness in her work. With a focus on holistic wellness and mental health, she creates spaces for critical food conversations and seeks to empower us all to think more critically about the food that we eat. Through supper clubs, cooking lessons, writing, events and food education, her focus is intentional nourishment. She is currently enrolled in a master’s programme in the Anthropology of Food at SOAS University.

For our first Artist Kitchen Salon, Safiya Robinson, founder of sisterwoman vegan shared her research exploring Afro-Caribbean supermarkets as a symbol of nationhood for the British Black Diaspora. 

Safiya’s work uses food as a tool to explore community, education and mindfulness and the salon opened with a grounding meditation. Adding intentional nourishment in the form of a supper club, Safiya created a space for critical food conservation. The menu for the salon incorporated thyme as an ingredient from the welcome drink to the starter, main and dessert and each dish represented a different element of her research. Invited guests interacted with the feel and smell of thyme and the research itself while being transported to Rye Lane, a southeast London hub for Afro-Caribbean supermarkets with an atmospheric soundscape.  

Thyme is often found in African and Caribbean dishes, including Jollof and jerk, which are recognised as key markers of West-African and West-Indian cultural identity, respectively. However, it was not originally grown within these regions, highlighting the tension between the construction of diaspora identity and nationhood.

While Afro-Caribbean supermarkets can be a sign to members of the black diaspora that “we are here”, historically, they are not owned by people within the community and the products sold are rarely black-owned. Food banks often don’t have cultural foods available, highlighting that members of the black diaspora are not considered part of the British national identity.

As part of this salon, attendees were encouraged to bring an item from their local Afro-Caribbean supermarket to donate to Brixton People’s Kitchen, a local food charity in-between Stuart Hall Library and Studio Voltaire.

Thursday 27 October 2022

Holly Graham is a London-based artist, working predominantly with print and audio. Much of her work looks at how memory and narrative shape collective histories. Holly holds a BFA from Oxford University and an MA in Printmaking from the Royal College of Art.

Recent solo projects include commissions with Glasgow Women’s Library, Glasgow (2022); Skelf, Online (2022); TACO!, London (2021-22); Robert Young Antiques, London (2021); Gaada, Shetland (2020); Goldsmiths CCA, Online (2020); and Southwark Park Galleries, London (2020). Holly is a Visiting Lecturer at the Royal College of Art, London, and is a Co-Founder of Cypher BILLBOARD, London. She is also a Trustee at Kingsgate Workshops.

For our second Artist Kitchen Salon, London-based artist Holly Graham shared her recent research into histories of anti-racist community-led organising in Thamesmead and its surrounding areas in the early 1990s, undertaken in partnership with arts organisation TACO! and Thamesmead Community Archive.

This period saw a rise in racial tensions within the area, but there is currently minimal documentation reflecting these rifts and the important community-led responses to counteract them. Over a shared meal devised by creative cook Safiya Robinson, Holly invited guests to consider these events in the context of a long history of nation-building and to explore possibilities for the shifting forms remembering can take in and out of the archive.

Using food as a starting point for tracing migratory routes, histories and storytelling, Holly contextualised this current research within the frame of previous bodies of work around links between land enclosure and expansionism and legacies of sugar and slavery. Safiya Robinson’s menu for the salon incorporated sugar as a key ingredient within several vegan sharing plates.

As we explored the wider history around Holly’s research investigating the formations of British history and identity, Holly sought to question:

• How do we address traumatic histories with sensitivity and nuance in a way that makes space for grief while also not centring or sensationalising trauma?
• What are meaningful ways of revisiting the past? Is there an importance in telling these stories?
• What forms can ‘memorial’ take?

Guests were invited to actively participate in a collective conversation with others at the table while sharing plates of foods that “ground us”, such as root vegetables with a choice of hot sweet condiment, Genny Graham Pepper Jelly, produced by Holly’s mum.

After a grounding meditation to digest the information shared, guests were encouraged over a sweet dessert to share their reflections on the research on postcards anonymously. These written postcards were collected to inform Holly’s work further making visible the collective histories of local communities.

Thursday 24 November 2022

Shenece Oretha is a London-based multidisciplinary artist sounding out the voice and sound’s mobilising potential. Through installation, performance, print, sculpture, sound, workshops and text, she amplifies and celebrates listening and sound as an embodied and collective practice. In collaboration with groups in the community with Open School East and Despacito Art School in Margate, Oretha created a soundscape work for DRIFT – a post-national digital pavilion.

For our third Artist Kitchen Salon, Shenece shared her recent research sounding histories of the materials behind the sounds of the Caribbean diaspora. Shenece is interested in how we can interact with sounds and explore how food can be a textually sonic part of journeys travelled to and from the sea. Drawing from Black oral and feminist traditions of call and response central to Shenece’s practice, guests listened to her new soundscape created for DRIFT, over an evening meal.

The menu incorporated food that made different sounds while eating and different types of salt in each course. Beginning with a warm ceremonial tea and the percussion of popcorn being made, we then moved towards the starter. Inspired by the ritual of making dinner, guests shared musician and poet Sun Ra’s Moon Stew soup whilst being transformed to the sea with the music of Shenece’s soundscape playing. As we thought about the blending of sounds of food and music, guests were encouraged to feedback into Shenece’s research through prompted questions to create a recorded performance dinner.

Friday 17 March 2023

Beatrix Pang Sin Kwok 彭倩幗 (they/them, Hong Kong) is a visual artist, cultural producer and independent publisher. In their current year-long residency at Studio Voltaire,  Beatrix plans to expand their self-publishing practice and produce a series of zines in collaboration with Studio Voltaire’s studio community and audiences. They will also further their experimentations with still/moving image, writing and printing production, and explore the potential of the kitchen and food to bring London’s London’s East and Southeast Asian (ESEA) diasporic communities together.

For the fourth and final Artist Kitchen Salon, Beatrix shared their ongoing research into how food can anchor and connect us with our cultural roots and chosen family. Expanding on conversations started in Hong Kong, Beatrix connected with members of ESEA's genderqueer community to explore migration and diaspora stories as it relates to the fluidity of their experience.

To move away from Western forms of thinking about trans-formation, the menu was inspired by dehydrated ingredients that expand or transform in water – a symbolic link to the navigation of trans experience over time and space. Connecting land and sea, the key ingredients included seaweed, sea moss, mushrooms and burdock root that grow everywhere like a diasporic network.

Guests were welcomed with a soothing ginger and burdock root tea, followed by a mushroom-based starter. Published materials from Beatrix’s practice were shared during the main dish of comforting cup noodles in broth. Guests personalised their cup noodles with silver fungus, dried burdock root, and sesame oil or soy sauce seasoning, which expanded within the broth.

Over an assortment of refreshing fruit jellies, guests provided anonymous handwritten reflections with stories about comfort food. These notes will be used to form part of Beatrix’s research for the publication of a new zine.