Nevra Akdemir, after her "Yemek, Kültür ve Toplumsal Cinsiyet" (Food, Culture and Gender) lecture organised in collaboration with Off-University and Osnabrück University in the Spring 2022 semester, is now organizing a workshop in Turkish with some of the participants of the lecture and new participants in order to further understand the subject and expand the curiosity in the field. The workshop will take place on the Off-University platform Coworkingsquares on Saturday, December 3rd, 2022 from 10:00-14:00 (CET) in Turkish.
The event will take place on the Off-University platform Coworkingsquares. Please click on this link to register. For questions, please send an e-mail to yemekleoynamak@off-university.de, and follow their Instagram page @yemekleoynamak! Continue reading for details:
The aim of the workshop is to use a game to expose the intimidating power relations in the kitchen triangle and to think together about how we can build a gender-equal, emancipatory and solidaristic kitchen and table practice. That's why we want to start from the beginning: For whom should we develop a game? What should we put at the center of the game? Which tools should we use to produce the game? How can we develop a framework for a game that allows us to rethink culinary practice?
In this context, we would like to say that the workshop seeks answers to 4 questions. These questions will be at the center of the sessions of our workshop.
First question / first session: What are the thinking possibilities that the field of food studies can open up for us?
Second question / second session: The primordial source of human learning is play. How then can the possibilities, limits and politics of returning to play through food and the kitchen be defined; what perspectives does it include or exclude?
Third question / third session: if design is the constitutive element in uniting play and food, how can we design design?
Fourth question / fourth session: Food and culinary games are like playing in a dystopia by looking at a utopia. Is it possible, then, to play a game in which it is possible to win through solidarity and cooperation instead of competitiveness; to appreciate the routines that arise from the egalitarian sharing of domestic labor; to discover the rewards in the magical world of recipes?
...
We would like to set a table with you...
Where solidarity makes itself felt at every step,
where women who are confined to kitchens, who are isolated in homes, who are made invisible by the care work of the whole society, do not have to clean up after meals,
with the products of a queer kitchen that carries every color of the rainbow not only in its serving napkins,
who do not submit to exploitative relations with food from corners of the world that we have never had the opportunity to visit, which is packaged and placed in front of us at the expense of the poverty and deprivation of people we have never had the opportunity to know, who do not consent to the plunder of nature and the cruelty of animals for products so that we can eat them on our tables,
re-tasting and re-minding the history that power relations want to make us forget, between the lines of recipes,
and most importantly, to learn how to set better tables for everyone, and to produce the recipes of solidarity together,
we would like to set a table with you...
With the idea that food and the material world around it is both extremely vital and a set of material realities in which inequalities and exploitation are reproduced; that food is a symbolic repertoire in which social relations and belonging are produced, an indicator of race-class-gender-all kinds of power relations, and a very powerful tool for understanding and changing the social structure as a cultural performance.
Play, on the other hand, is one of the archaic tools that organize the dynamics of adaptation and opposition by producing a simulation of society. For people of all ages, play is the most basic and easy way to understand and explain a subject. Perhaps when we look at the power relations that have become routine and are embodied around food and the table as the protagonists of a game, we can make them more visible. We can discuss how to get out of the gendered, racialized kitchens that have become indicators of social status and identity, this time while playing. We can understand and explain the contradiction between those who consume a lifetime behind the bread in the lion's mouth and those who have access to "food" throughout history, precisely while trying to set a table that wants to change this.
We are already excited to discuss what can be done when the idea of play and food meet. As we continue our work, we would like to discuss the "kitchen" with you and set the "rules of the game" together.
We would like to meet with you in a workshop to develop a game idea that will allow us to build a queer, anticapitalist, anticolonialist table where solidarity sits at the center. In this meeting, we invite you to present your work that you deem relevant, to develop our ideas, and to find new common paths. |
