Spacedumpling

How do you cook away from home? Rys, ross, arroz, arisi. How does cooking make your home really feel like home in a foreign city? K̄ĥāw, cơm, kanin, camala. How do recipes change in new environments—how do they make home feel like home? Papa, batata, aaloo, aardappel. What memories, what knowledge, and what feelings of being at home are contained in recipes? Khoai tây, kentang, kartol, Kartoffel. How are diasporic and migratory realities shaped and made by people, their food and its ingredients? Manti, mandu, momo, pierogi, jiaozi, gyoza, Klöße, yomari. 

The past itself is a different country, and each recipe, each dish can be traced to both a different time and place. Preparing a dish and sharing it with others invokes moments and memories, possibly adapting them to new homes and towards new visions of a shared future. 

From July 1 to 11, ifa Gallery Stuttgart will be transformed into a kitchen—a meeting place where recipes, meals, and stories can be shared. The programme is centred around cooking evenings during which we will prepare food and eat together. For this event, ifa Gallery Stuttgart invited individuals, initiatives, communities, and artists via an open call in and around and traversing through Stuttgart to share recipes and the stories connected with them, and to prepare their proposed meals together with the other guests. The evenings will be accompanied by screenings, discussions, performances, music and other contributions by the participants, and they will be traced through a growing archive in the gallery.

The recipes are all associated with at least one of two central ingredients and a concept, all of which are common to food around the world: rice, potatoes, and dumplings. Coming from the supposedly old and the supposedly new worlds, rice and potatoes migrated and mingled from disparate points across the planet, yet ingrained themselves into diverse food cultures, making themselves undeniably local in places once foreign to them. And what makes a dumpling? An old English word of purported Germanic origins, the word dumpling is applied to a broad class of dishes that consist of pieces of cooked dough (made from a variety of starchy sources), wrapped around a filling (both sweet and savoury), whose many varieties and definitions reflect the many different cultures that cook it. As an archive of the project, the recipes and reflections will be collected in a printed publication.

This programme was initiated in conversation with Philippine artist and curator Merv Espina, whose artistic practice and research explores the movements of ideas and ingredients, leading to alternative stories and new readings of archives. The plan for Spacedumpling was devised by Merv Espina, Bettina Korintenberg, Gabriel Rossell Santillán, and Siri Thiermann.

With contributions by:
Afghan Women Stuttgart e.V.; Ania Corcilius; ifa Integration and Media Team; RATHAUS in Kochertürn: Daina Mattis, Elisabeth Roth; Iden Sungyoung Kim; International Forum for Science, Education and Culture e.V.; Irasema Fernández; Joanna Kühling; Marina Lang; Kitchen_Ferm_Lab (Fanny Kranz and Max Kosorić); Lem TragNguyen; Mamma Mia! e.V.; Nazanin Sahamizadeh; Sadya Mizan; Communication Design HTWG Konstanz; Sun from Von OPA; Tuğçe Şahin Burchiellaro; Ypatia Selioni 

For the detailed programme and registration, please see the Spacedumpling website. 

Spacedumpling is the first chapter of Agua Quemada (Burnt Water), an ifa Gallery Stuttgart programme that will shape the conceptual framework for events and exhibitions for one year. Agua Quemada is devised by six curators working together: Merv Espina, Oulimata Gueye, Paz Guevara, Bettina Korintenberg, Mauricio Marcín, and Gabriel Rossell Santillán. There are four chapters, which will unfold from July 2024 to summer 2025 in various formats, and will address issues such as diasporic movements, memory, resistance, regeneration, and community, as well as ancestral technologies and forms of knowledge.