Yujia Wang

Image caption: A collage of overlapping landscapes from participants' home countries and Southwark. Text says; For us, to share.

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.

A digital sculpture of three intertwining bike chains with snake heads, cuddling to stay warm.

Yujia is interested in exploring curatorial practices that, in performative ways, question imagined boundaries and examine identity formation through a transnational lens. Situated in London, her curatorial practices speak locally and internationally about ways of being and belonging. Kinships that cross conventional identity boundaries are particularly interesting to her.

In her graduate dissertation, ‘Queering Borders: Exploring Queer Exhibitions Through a Transnational Lens’, Yujia looked at queer and trans/national together to identify how exhibitions exploring LGBTQIA+ issues position themselves globally and locally in relation to the Western-centric discourses on ‘queerness’. The exploration identified problematic narratives of homo-nationalism and regionalism that secure ideas of geopolitical identity and sexuality through mutually reinforcing ideas of fixity, thus juxtaposing the traditional modality of curating as representation and the performative space of the curatorial. This dissertation unveils how performative exploration of queer diasporic experiences can hold space for new visions of solidarity to emerge.

Yujia co-curated For us, to share, a project in collaboration with Southwark Park Galleries and the Bosco Centre in Rotherhithe. For us, to share explores ideas of home via food, spice, and the in-between space of translation with students from the Bosco Centre. The group, all of whom currently call Southwark home, includes refugees, migrants, asylum seekers and other local residents, who came together to share stories, recipes and food. Over four workshops with artist Saima Rasheed and mother tongues, a local and global multidisciplinary collective, the young people explored local history archives, 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 different cultures into one place.

Yujia also makes digital art that explores themes of anxiety, instability and nostalgia.

For us, to share - a recipe book of small flavours from Southwark