Open Kitchen: Gut-Luck: month-long three-course food forum
Throughout the month of May, art collective-in-residence Open Kitchen (OK) will gather around a pedagogically speculative installation celebrating spring ephemera. A rotation of ceramic sculptures and wares will accompany three public courses coinciding with a forthcoming publication, The False Expectations of Food; stories and recipes from one ruin to another.
Conceived as a backdrop for the lectures, the ceramics range from the semi-functional to the sculptural, studies of natural forms and movement. They are transformed into mysterious “objects left behind” between public engagements, asking us what has taken place, or will take place, in this space.
Course One: The False Expectations of Food, Introduction/Reading
May 7, 2023, 11 am-12:30 pm
Free but registration required. Click here to register online.
In OK’s research as Lynden artists-in-residence, collective members work towards a field guide that explores our everyday relationships to what we eat. We ask ourselves, what do we expect from food amidst a seemingly disastrous constellation of social, cultural, technological, political, economic, and environmental conditions creeping into our digestive ways?
Course Two: Early Lessons in Beekeeping
May 20, 2023, 11 am-12:30 pm
Registration is closed. To be added to the waitlist, email staff@lyndensculpturegarden.org. Please include your name and the number of attendees.
In preparation for (and eager anticipation of!) a new learning branch at the Lynden Sculpture Garden —the Lynden Apiary— Open Kitchen collective members Rudy and Alan Medina will lecture informally on the many (and one) way/s of beekeeping. The lecture will drift from one imagination to another across histories and peoples, into the curious and generous patterns of bees.
Course Three: Gut-Farm, *Mmmm!
May 28, 2023 2-4 pm
Fee: $25/$20 members.
Registration is closed. To be added to the waitlist, email staff@lyndensculpturegarden.org. Please include your name and the number of attendees.
A course reviewing Open Kitchen’s 2022 residency at BiSCA (Bishkek School of Contemporary Art) and participation in the Eco-Festival TRASH-4: Follow the Trash River in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan.
From the open all for the Trash Festival
The eco-festival focuses on water and garbage issues in Bishkek and aims to create reflection and discussion. Together with activists, scientists, artists, citizens we are going to create a platform for communication that explores methodologies of how we can solve global environmental problems on a local and global level through reflections, experiments, art-intervention, analysis, installations, publications.
The review will begin with the reading of an open letter titled Letter to Altyn-Kazyk, its Friends and Ours (to be featured in BiSCA’s Aralash Zine). This letter reflects on OK's time in the Altyn-Kazyk neighborhood of Bishkek, where a community intersects a river, agricultural fields, and a toxic landfill.
In conjunction with this reading, *Milwaukee masa mole mill! will host a spring mole tasting with ingredients sourced from art collective Postane (Istanbul) and from OK’s 2022 residency in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. The mole will be paired with fresh masa tortillas (from our 2022 Lynden-grown corn) and a Turkish plum, Kyrgyz mountain honey, and backyard-borage tea.
Open Kitchen’s residency in Kyrgyzstan was supported by the Mary L. Nohl Suitcase Export Fund. Support for Milwaukee-masa-mole-mill is provided by The Open Fund, through the Poor Farm, with funding from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
About Open Kitchen
Open Kitchen (OK) is a Milwaukee-based art collective founded in 2017. OK stages events, installations, and a residency program that engages the public in critical cross-cultural conversations on food, identity, and ecology. Each of the programs takes shape through regional and seasonal food-related research projects, gastronomic gatherings, interdisciplinary collaborations, and site-specific happenings.
