It's the year 2192. You have been invited to lunch at a small restaurant nestled within an e-waste dump in downtown Berlin. The restaurant is run by five witches who slipped through the veil to escape medieval witch hunts and have been thoughtfully advancing their relationship-based material transformation technologies ever since. They would like to discuss franchising opportunities with you over lunch. Together, you will sit down to a meal seeped into the kitchen from the surrounding dump through layers of magic and time, reworking dysfunction into material kinship and creamy pleasure.
The session will begin with a history of kitchen design as a membrane between the molecules of body and environment. We will trace the domestic tools, appliances, and utilities that have modulated our bodies' needs and desires, and the metabolic rifts between them propagated via capitalist-patriarchal enlightenment belief. Next we will introduce a draft set of principles for witches' kitchen design, working to derive comestible power from intimacy rather than control, from partnership rather than exploitation, and from ritual rather than speed or efficiency. Together we will then test out the principals, prototyping the creation of this new kind of work space for feminist technologies. We will meet for lunch in our imagined witches’ kitchen at the center of the dump to experiment with what we might cook for lunch there, how and why. After the design charrette, we will all discuss our findings to distill new understandings and possibilities for the witch and her kitchen, enriched by the experience of the workshop and by the collective sharing and troubling of ideas across the broader symposium.
Facilitators:
Petja Ivanova
Born in Shumen, Bulgaria and based in Berlin, Petja graduated from the University of Arts Berlin in the class for Computational Art/Generative Art in 2015. She is research associate at SpecSpace a speculative design research endeavour at the center for design research at the Hamburg college of applied sciences HAW Hamburg and runs Studio for Poetic Futures and Speculative Ecologies out of a little caravan in Berlin. In her trans-disciplinary practice she combines archaeology, biology, physics, computation and the poetic in order to promote the ‘poetic method’ as a counterweight to the socially dominating ‘scientific method’, understanding this practice in non-linear relation with Fluxus & Avantgarde.
Sarah Kantrowitz
Sarah is a designer loving on the knot between food and the built environment, working to help build infrastructure for food systems that are juicy, diverse, and grounded in mutually-nourishing relationships. Against a backdrop of fear-based approaches to food safety that privilege hyper-industrialization and corporate control in the food system, Sarah focuses on supporting the design of food processing facilities to better partner with microbial abundance. Recent past work includes running a week-long dairy spa for cheese makers in a village in the italian alps, mapping microbial ecologies within open fermentation facilities, and advising the FDA on food safety in direct-to-consumer delivery logistics. Sarah holds a Master of Architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and a Bachelor of Arts in Linguistics from Reed College, and is currently based in Massachusetts.
