Kaia Goodenough

Layered images of different landscapes with handwritten interpretations of 'For us, to share' in different languages

For us to share explores ideas of home via food, spice, and the in-between space of translation with students from the Bosco Centre in Rotherhithe. The group all called Southwark home at the time of the workshops, including refugees, migrants, asylum seekers and local residents. They came together to share stories, recipes and food. Working with artist Saima Rasheed and mother tongues a local and global multidisciplinary collective, over four workshops, they explored local history archives at John Harvard Library in Southwark, painted with herbs and spices and translated their own recipes of home through multiple forms of media to create a visual recipe book that brings many different cultures into one place. The book was launched at Southwark Park Galleries on Saturday 7th May in a recipe sharing that acted as a call and response from one community to another.

This project was conceived and delivered at a moment when migration and community displacement was on the rise with policies demeaning those who travel to the UK for a better life becoming ever more severe. Situated in and responding to current global affairs, For us, to share sought to celebrate the many similarities and differences found in culture, memory and language. Ultimately, the group's lived experience is a microcosm of what is happening on a global scale.

The memory of their own food or their favourite meals became the translation. Transcending language barriers, everybody was able to communicate through their own recipes and visuals. Reclaiming the stickiness of communication through acts of painting, collaging, eating and drawing.

For us, to share is constant, the project can continue to develop with your contribution. Food is a tangible history passed through hands and oceans; this book is a message to the relationship we all have with places and people.

The students, artists and curators have given permission for their stories and recipes to be shared. We encouraged participants at the sharing to add their own recipes and continue to share this book, enabling their food to travel beyond your home.

The book can be found at The British Library, Canada Water Library, Camberwell Library, Walworth Library and currently in exhibition Southwark Today at Southwark Heritage Centre from 6 June 2022 until June 2023, curated by Syrup.

The digital PDF can be found at the bottom of the page by clicking Read more

Recipe book design by Jennifer Whitworth

Printed by ME PRINT

For us, to share, curated by students from the Royal College of Art MA Curating Contemporary Art, is a part of 2022 Graduate Projects in partnership with Southwark Park Galleries. For us, to share was created in collaboration with the Bosco Centre, Saima Rasheed and mother tongues.

$Red light refracted across the collar bones of a dancing torso$

A body of water holds so much potential.

Eventually bottled consumed and abject.

Constant transfiguration. Moving. Multiplying. A collective of individuals that shift together

and apart.

Supporting and supplying an eco-system. A body.

An abject body.

Inviting us to connect and participate,

holding space for what they have experienced before, to become anti-body, a collection of abject anti-bodies rushing over the shores and running from the tap.

A community. A body.

I situate my practice within the idea of a community being a body of water. Recognising that we are one element of a much larger eco-system of living organisms, a raindrop within a tsunami, begins to unfurl the hierarchies that we, as humans, incessantly create to form ‘order’.

My curatorial practice centres itself around collaboration, encouraging a transparency of labour and influence. Forming relationships and connections to create cyclical learning environments that are inspired by the innate human need to move with people and be moved by them. Taking inspiration from club culture and my work as a contemporary dancer and choreographer, I treat audiences as the infrastructure of art spaces, constantly questioning who is performing.

I practice an abject curatorial, that which does not respect borders, promoting difference and refusing objectification within representational aesthetics, finding pleasure within its ambiguity and queerness. Flooding and evaporating, it can move against the law and through different states.

My urgency for the audience to feel included in art spaces, is an act of queering the curatorial. Although coming from an economically unprivileged background, I have had a privileged creative upbringing, and would like to continue to extend this invitation through my work. My dissertation research of the potentials of a queer curatorial exposes the visitor to their value and necessity of their attendance.

Art, movement and collective consciousness are forms of communication that can transcend a conversation, dealing with topics that are often unfathomable. It is this in-between space of reception that excites me as a curator. Undeterminable but holds all the possibility of the artworks. I situate my practice within this intangible space, facilitating the stories of others and the multiple ways an artwork can be understood – engendering wider communities and society.

Workshop participants with Saima Rasheed painting with spices

Saima Rasheed workshop to create a collective table runner

Students artworks exhibited in The Bothy at Southwark Park Galleries

Participants of sharing, swapping recipes at Southwark Park Galleries

A table runner o drawings with lentils and spices showing hands, plants, water and food.

An extract of the table runner

A selection of books showing handwritten recipes that were shared

Recipe sharing

Kaia Goodenough

Social

About

Royal College of Art