Queer Recipes Archive (Community Workshop)

Queer Recipes Archive is an interactive workshop-performance that explores who defines the “traditional” version of a dish, and whose experiences its recipe leaves out. As a reimagined version is performed and prepared live, we trace how its ingredients and techniques have changed and acquired meaning through migration, labour, gender and power.

To queer a recipe is to question the instructions inherited from it, letting our own bodies and appetites change what the dish can become. Participants will get to create a double-layered zine in response to what they have experienced, rewriting the recipe through their own memories and desires, contributing to a growing archive of stories told through food. All materials will be provided, and everyone will be able to take their zines home.

Open to adults aged 18 and over, especially queer and trans folks, and to anyone interested in the social and cultural dimensions of food and its possibilities for sensory storytelling. No cooking or writing experience is needed! Free to attend, but registration via DICE is essential.

About the Artist-Facilitators:
Jo Pereira da Costa is a sensory artist and performance maker who uses food and scent as dramaturgical tools to explore embodied knowledge and social histories. They founded Aftertaste, a creative studio producing edible theatre through dinner-performances, where stories are watched and tasted, and the physiological effects of eating on diners become part of the storytelling.
Rachel is an Anthropology of Food student at SOAS, and is interested in the politics of appetite, deliciousness as resistance, and how gender and class play into cookery. She is an intern at Petit Propos Culinaires journal, representing their publisher, Equinox, at this year’s Oxford Food Symposium, and is currently researching mustard and olive oil production for the Food Museum.