I invited Rirkrit for a joint workshop venture during Impulstanz because of my admiration for RT’s ‚social choreographies’, his communal cooking performances in the last 20 years. In my view, Rirkrit is interested in setting up socio-spatial conditions that create and allow for various hospitalities, a practice that feels close to mine.
And so we meet and talk on a cloudy Berlin afternoon in the beginning of July. We have tea on a small terrace in Charlottenburg and talk about movies, our artistic practices, and of course about cooking in various environments. What about installing mobile cooking devices in the streets of Vienna, but also visiting shelters for homeless people or refugee camps, entering black boxes or white cubes, opening restaurants for one day in places that are closed during summer? What’s the ‘performative impact’ in interventions that spontaneously open up an alternative perspective and, on top of all, create conditions for hospitality? How do we tie our micro-action into the larger picture, into the macro-perspective of society, what kind of space do we produce when we intervene in a given spatial environment? But no, no academic discussion here. We are rather totally nourrished by a hands-on approach of ‚what’s cooking?’
Standing in the kitchen, Rirkrit measuring the temperature of the simmering (!!) water whilst Peter is standing in the doorway, we also talk about the imaginative power of story-telling. RT speaks about empty exhibitions of his in large museum halls in which guides or docents describe to the visitors art objects of his that are not there, that are absent, not to be seen. By description and story-telling, they rather make them manifest in one’s individual imagination. Click: a point of departure I am also very interested in: how to create worlds with the power of mere words? Challenging the practice of representation, of objecthood by evoking imagination, by planting an image in the head of the beholder, the spectator instead?
There is a force of imagination within story-telling and oral narrations, some blasting force that we tend to overlook in our world that is stuffed with objects, things, the lure of the visible. Piecing a world together that doesn’t exist maybe opens up to some hidden politics within this practice, a political practice of not being okay with the world that instead should be altered by our imaginative forces. This is not just concerning the politics of seeing differently, it’s also addressing the politics of experiencing with one’s own body.
And here creating the convivial experience of cooking together meets the experience of imagining other convivial spaces, other communitarian takes which are not forced upon bodies, but created by a collective imaginary...
(ps)
