The Kinship Cookbook
master project
The Kinship Cookbook is an ongoing proposition to gather, speculate and share knowledge around the forming of inclusive infrastructures, using the recipe as both a curatorial and an artistic method. It emerges from feminist and queer practices of care and treats the making of a recipe as a gesture at once poetic and political, a way of collectively imagining worlds built on empathy and reciprocity, and on a mutual becoming.
Rooted in gatherings that fold the domestic into the speculative, it uses the recipe as a vessel for storytelling and shared authorship. Each gathering turns on a theme that participants answer through personal narrative, symbolic ingredient and performative gesture, and over time these recipes accumulate into a living collective manifesto that grows through shared experience and ritual. In this the cookbook redraws the terms of authorship, moving from the object oriented to the process oriented, from the hierarchical to the horizontal, from a single artist's voice to a constellation of kin. Rarely culinary, the recipes work instead as metaphors for healing and remembering and for the building of other worlds.
As an installation, the project carries this ethos into space. Taking emergent kinships as the prototypes through which the recipes are visualised, it opens a multisensory environment that grows and transforms across the time it is shown, responding as it goes, making care and kindness into aesthetic principles and letting the work breathe as a living and evolving ecosystem.
The cookbook itself now gathers the material drawn from the first two gatherings, Home Sweet Home and To Weave a Story, and holds within it the video work Home is Where the Heart. That film returns to the ten people who formed the first collective at Home Sweet Home, the inaugural gathering that asked what home might be as a site of intimacy and care, and of transformation. Through a collective reading and writing, a shared performance and an ephemeral installation built in situ from personal objects and offerings, the group made a temporary home out of dialogue. The recipes written there became vessels for memory and imagination, and activated afterwards through performance, sculpture and installation, they keep growing, carrying the evolving nature of queer kinship and the interdependence of human and other than human beings, a practice of becoming with one another rooted in kindness and curiosity.