Riders Not Heroes

The cooking show is as old as television itself. But why do we like watching the making of a meal that most of us will never cook, let alone eat? Dirty Furniture’s jam-packed video essay is a rollercoaster ride through the history of the genre, at once a staple of television viewing and a hotpot of shifting perspectives and sociocultural values.

Kitchen tools offer a support structure that generates social, environmental, and spatial situations, due to the gestures they involve and relations they create. In this work, the tool is reduced to its most archaic form—the hand, and by extension, the body. Rather than inventing new tools, the focus is placed on the tactility of making and sharing food, in the most simple, intimate, and domestic form. The conversation between Asako Iwama, Iris Lacoudre, and Camille Sineau unfolded in...

Olive trees hold the living knowledge of Mesopotamia. Since ancient times, they represent life, peace, and solidarity in the region. Soil composition and land ownership are tied to their cultivation. Social and labor relationships, families, commons, and cooperatives organize around their farming; the objects utilised in planting, picking, and processing also demonstrate these relationships. Olives and olive oil are used for care, hygiene, medicine, nurturing, luxury, food, fuel, and more....

In Laura Wilson’s Trained on Veda , a malted loaf and evolving artwork connected bakeries and galleries through veda bread. This film departs from that work, exploring and discussing collective memory, embodied knowledge, and the passing on of traditions, recipes and gestures through the preparation of a recipe, punctuated by clips from video works and interviews with Wilson’s collaborators. Wilson is joined in the kitchen by chef Irem Aksu, where they discuss the word “veda” and cook...

The New World Syrup & The Fever Hand is a performance lecture inspired by the return of yellow fever in South America. This old disease is deeply connected to the colonial sugar plantations in the Americas: it thrived in the sugar production region on Brazil's northeast coast, where plantations created the perfect environment for Aedes aegypti , the carrier mosquito imported from the African continent by European slave ships to the Americas. With at least thirty-six deaths between...

Filmed during and just after a two-month lockdown in Marseille, Let Us Heal Together is a visual exploration of a chalky, herbaceous landscape, as well as a guided meditation on how to develop relationships with the plants around us. While the flora are specific to the coastal, mountainous landscape, the intentions and ways of approaching them constitute a globally adaptable approach (like a basic recipe that can be developed and fine-tuned according to local tastes, desires, and seasons.)...

In Moon Cook , Nelly Ben Hayoun and chef Rabah Ourrad both prepare a traditional North African dish, couscous royal, from their respective kitchens in London and Algiers. As they cook, they discuss displacement, nation-states, colonization, moon exploration, and human settlements in space. Together, they think about possible futures on the moon, and they end up eating their couscous in a DIY moon setting they develop in their own kitchens.

Danças is a meditation on the employment and preparation of three ingredients that connect the cuisines of Turkey and Brazil—okra, chilies, and oranges—through the recounting of personal stories. These ingredients lead a double life: they are known primarily as food, while also being ingredients in preparations meant to induce fertility. Conversely, some attributes of these ingredients can be linked, symbolically and materially, to the deployment of tear gas as a form of crowd and...

Consider the space of your kitchen. Who do you share it with? Are they human? Non-human? Could others be let in? Softening Cultures takes its time to engage with the process of fermentation. Yeast and other microbes exist on the surfaces of almost everything we eat, yet they only thrive in certain environments. In the process of fermenting, we do not create them so much as we create environments for their futures. These microbes bump up against the walls of human empathy, but design...

To be contemporary might mean to re-learn how to dwell in instability, in uncertainty. Now that the notion of progress (or capitalist modernism) seems quite fragile and finally questionable, anything that once was solid, given, or true is currently in the process of evaporating. The viral pandemic affecting the global human population confirms the volatility of what we understood, until recently, as the stable world. This crisis calls for political aims to articulate newly perceived...

Riders Not Heroes investigates the precarious conditions of food delivery riders in Milan. It makes the case for riders as essential workers, lying at the intersection of platform capitalism, gig labor, refugee crises, and COVID-19.

In a long, narrow, modernist kitchen, Mayar El-Bakry, a Swiss-Egyptian designer, is cooking. Using anonymously designed cooking tools and objects ubiquitous to the SWANA (Southwest Asia and North Africa) region, she is preparing a variety of dishes: falafel, ma’amoul, kousa mahshi, tajine and other staples of the region. Each cooked dish highlights one protagonist tool or object, telling a different story. As we delve into these fragments of everyday home cooking, the voices and rich...

Nature is Healing presents the reflections of a character who has fled Brooklyn for the countryside during the spring of 2020. The protagonist documents her failed attempts at self-sufficiency, her efforts to reproduce the Instagram trends that surfaced in the early days of social distancing in New York City. She tries to grow a garden, keep scallions alive on her windowsill, make sourdough, and keep a journal. Every one of her projects wilts or goes bad. In the end, the solutions she...

An antidote to our relationship with the material world—generally framed by a rationalist apprehension of reality— object*oriented*magic creates new superstitions drawing from vernacular folk beliefs, psycho-magic, witchcraft, alchemy, and astrological methods. Everyday objects become the ingredients for ritualistic assemblages, and in the process become recharged with magic, mystery, and myth, revealing their inherent vibrancy. Three recipes from the manual of object*oriented*magic...

A confluence of forces—human invention, neoliberal economic legislation, a wellness food trend, and patents taken out on nature—have led to the collapse of the Petorca river landscape in Chile's Central Valley, erasing world-making livelihoods. Accountability stretches deep into the past when examining how the water crisis was enabled, and raises a question: can the idea of progress be challenged in favor of what Anna Tsing describes as “polyphonic assemblages,” a multi-species...

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...

Empathy begins with acknowledging the position of our body in the world, not simply towards a different body, but also across time and dimensions. Food spans across all aspects of our lives, from the most profane everyday nourishment to the sacrifices that made an anthropological imprint on the collective psyche. It connects science and myth, known and unknown. The meal, the settlement, the landscape, the cosmos, down to the microbial and viral in our guts and in the air—food allows us to...

The Case of Meat explores manifold stories behind the meat industry in Argentina. Taking off from the personal narrative of Tata Moya, an ex-worker at a slaughtering facility in the Argentine pampas, this film opens the curtain on an industry socially designed to remain out of sight. Working against the common assumption that the slaughterhouse is a space designed to confine and conceal the violent encounter between butchers and cattle, the video delves into the complex cultural tales of a...

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 , curated by Mariana Pestana with Sumitra Upham and Billie Muraben. One of the three main axes of the Biennial, it features videos by Nelly Ben Hayoun and chef Rabah Ourrad; BUREAU (Daniel Zamarbide), chef Walter El Nagar, and Filipe Felizardo; Vivian Caccuri; Zuri Camille de Souza; depatriarchise...