"This project proposes the table as a relational mediation device that shifts art away from the "lifeless" white cube and toward embodied, social, and sensory encounter. The project centers on the other senses, such as smell, taste, and touch, which are often excluded from institutional exhibition formats. It approaches food as a medium and cooking as a method to explore further curatorial praxis. The project investigates how food, culture, migration, labour, collective and personal memory, and spatial praxis can be activated through a shared table. It frames the kitchen table as a political site where domestic experience, social relations, and cultural histories are negotiated both locally and across broader transnational contexts.

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Theoretical Frame

The conceptual framework draws from Queer Phenomenology by Sara Ahmed and also draws on Nicolas Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics and Patricia Alvarez Astacio’s tactile analytics to position other neglected senses and to utilize their co-presence as collective forms of meaning-making.

 

Methods & Findings

Kitchen Table works through participatory, sensory, and dialogic formats. Its methods include a tactile essay using raw ingredients to trigger memory and association, a communal meal in which participants become co-authors of the work, and a real-time digital curation process that gathers texts and visuals into an on-site zine. Collaborators from diverse backgrounds and genders are invited to take part in the project’s cooking sessions and collective exchanges. Planned outputs include a research database, memory mapping and collecting processes, sensory essays, digital zines, and potentially a short film." - Okkar Moe