What is a Kitchen?

We are constantly grappling with how to best articulate the more abstract concepts of our work. Of course, this is foodwork, right? We’re harvesting food, cooking food, sharing, talking, reading and writing about food. These are the artistic / archival mediums we use to create cultural and ancestral sanctuaries, to tell our stories, to collect and document cultural artifacts and knowledge. By using food, we are reclaiming spaces that have been wrought with harmful connotations and bloodied histories. Spaces like the kitchen.

But what is a kitchen? Why do we search for them?

The Kitchen is the heart of the home. A space central to our communal healing practices. It’s a portal to the past, a safe space for the present and a laboratory for crafting more optimal futures. Vertamae perfectly illustrates the transmutative power of the kitchen in Vibration Cooking with her piece “The Kitchen”.

“The kitchen is the most important room in my home. It’s where I do my thing [...] I just do everything in the kitchen.”

Where the kids do homework and friends come to share space, where we labor and meditate, dance and create. We use the kitchen as a liminal space, constantly testing the boundaries, the same way we confront the limitations of “standard” English language. One of our favorite kitchens sits outdoors, on a farm, the boundary between soil and plate almost nonexistent; a place where we both rediscovered our connection to land. And another, the one in which we birthed Our Mothers’ Kitchens: all spices and cast iron and color, all memories and laughter. When we occupy these spaces, in sisterhood, in community, we’re doing more than just tellin’ lies and cooking. We’re world building. And time traveling. And inviting ancestors back to this plane. That’s why we set the altar.

Essentially, this is memory work; or what our sister Vashti DuBois of The Colored Girls Museum calls “sanctuary work”. We integrate our favorite mediums, (food, literature, music, poetry, altar work, growing and even interior design) to create an immersive, asomatous experience. Where the past and present hold hands and meals become both ritual and performance.