Tongue Twisting Dinners is a series of four monthly dinners hosted by Eathouse. The dinners explore ways of initiating critical dialogue around contemporary urgencies by bringing people and culinary practice together. For each session Eathouse will host a different topic elaborated by guests whose research will guide the dialogue. The dinners will try out unconventional formats that attempt to dissolve the separation between host, guest and audience through inclusive prompts.

The conversation during the second Tongue Twisting Dinner focused on issues of food sovereignty, belonging and recognition of cultures through local culinary practices. Eathouse invited guests Alaa Abu Asad, Escuela de Garaje (Santiago Pinyol) and Michael Lewis to elaborate on their experiences and knowledge and discuss the questions below:

How to keep alive recipes of oppressed communities and occupied lands?
How to avoid appropriation of local practices in times of forced migrations?
How to advocate for the land we live on and make space for local networks in the global trade market?
What are the methods for cultivating land in urban environments?

About the guests:

Alaa Abu Asad is an artist, researcher, and photographer. Language and plants are central themes through which he develops alternative trajectories where values of (re)presentation, translation, viewing, reading, and understanding can intersect. His work takes the form of writing, film, and interactive installations, in which he visually represents his research and explores the boundaries of languages.

Escuela de Garaje (The garage school) sparkled in Bogotá in 2013 as an informal program that improvises its structure every time it happens, depending on its subject and the context in which it will happen. The school needs minimal or no infrastructure endowment and we are interested in knowledge and tools that are considered irrelevant, of low quality or without official validity. In relationship terms the escuela relationship anarchy project, there are no official members. The general objective of the school is to collectively unlearn, freely and for free. Right we are working diasporically, from the kitchen as a place of situated study and researching about collective translation.

Michael Lewis is an accountant living in Rotterdam. He has a lifelong affinity with wholesome food and non produced orally transmitted folk music.

Tongue Twisting Dinners has been kindly supported by CBK Rotterdam and Gemeente Rotterdam.

Graphic Design Studio Lieneman
Photos courtesy Nick Thomas