Municipal Kitchens

Municipal Kitchens asks how communal food provision can become a tool for social transformation. ‘Municipal’ here means de-privatising and de-domesticating food: away from a commodity to a common good, and out from behind closed doors into the public realm. By reframing food as a shared responsibility, the practices in this book reclaim a fundamental activity of both survival and pleasure from the logics of profit and individualism. 

For the artists, researchers, and activists in this book, the kitchen is a place to gather, but also one from which to think and act. Their contributions trace what colonisation, caste, and displacement have done to the way we eat and remember through food. They imagine new (and rediscover old) ways of producing and distributing food, and build tables, pantries, and dining halls where fairer arrangements can be rehearsed. What they propose is not only another way of eating, but of collectively reorganising urban life.

Conceived and developed by Johann Arens, Hanna Baumann, Miriam Lowack, Alicja Rogalska, and Cherry Truluck, Municipal Kitchens extends the enquiries and collaborations of the exhibition of the same name held at neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst (nGbK), Berlin.

Edited by Hanna Baumann and Johann Arens. Concept and Introduction by Johann Arens, Hanna Baumann, Miriam Lowack, Alicja Rogalska, and Cherry Truluck. Texts and artwork by Another Provision, Mirna Bamieh, Alicja Rogalska & Hanna Baumann, Cocina CoLaboratorio, Elia Nurvista, Cherry Truluck, Erica Ferrari, Rajyashri Goody, Miriam Lowack. Sara Naffati & Moana Skambraks, and Abigail McCall.