Broadcasting from Crown Heights, Your Mouth Has Power is a collective message from Brooklyn about food sovereignty, resilience, and culture during a precarious period of both pandemic and revolution. Inspired by 1990s MTV, TikTok videos, the video works of artist Arthur Jafa, and Jenn Nkiru’s “cosmic archaeology,” the film challenges the conventions of cooking shows by placing our understanding of imagery and viewership in friction with vignettes from black pop culture and historic references.
By sharing the ways that individuals and communities in Brooklyn have responded to the anxieties of system collapse with networks of care and radical imagination, the film invites viewers to become active participants in an inequitably designed food system that only has space for consumers. The text from MOLD’s manifesto, Your Mouth Has Power (2019), champions the creation of hyperlocal food ecologies, providing a portal into a field of ideas and a scaffold for a set of disparate actions, ideas, places, and collaborators emanating from Crown Heights to your neighborhood.
Critical Cooking Show is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture and the Istanbul Design Biennial within the context of its fifth edition, Empathy Revisited: Designs for more than one.
