Kitchen Futures: Participatory Taste Workshops and the Battle for Together

Abstract

ABSTRACT Since 2016 I have been developing and performing what I call ‘participatory taste workshops’. Embedded within art festivals, the workshops research taste by using taste as a transdisciplinary method. Site-responsive kitchen laboratories invite experimental ethnographies of culturally specific tasting conditions. In April 2020, at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, I collaborated with culinary historian Allison Reynolds to organize a Zoom event, Bake Together: Anzac Biscuits Live. The virtual format created markedly different futures from the futures made by in person workshops. Zoom distilled and complicated feminist, queer methodologies activated by in-person workshops. Writing from these differences, this article traces the feminist futuring implications of Bake Together methodologies. Moving between participatory taste workshop methods and the practices of contemporary artists working in Australia and the US, including Mēlani Douglass, Michael Mandiberg, Laurie Anderson, James Nguyen, Michael Rakowitz, Ionat Zurr and Oron Catts, I trace how domestic corridors of soft power flow through Bake Together into broader social worlds.