The Illustrated and Sonic Cookbook of Food as Means of Resistance

The Illustrated and Sonic Cookbook of Food as Means of Resistance
Text, Graphic and Sound Publication
Created between 2020 and 2021
Duration: 43 minutes
Created under a comission by The Making Space

Only the act of resistance resists death, either as a work of art or as a human struggle.
-Gilles Deleuze

This cookbook presents a series of food recipes prepared and consumed in circumstances of adversity, hardship and precarity around the world. From prisons in the US to vulnerable communities in Bogota, Colombia, these dishes provide comfort to individuals and communities resisting struggle, dependency, violence, detrimental social policies, unfair working conditions. For this book, I cooked the selected recipes myself, photographed the process and recorded its sounds. I used photos to draw a series of illustrations and edited the recordings. The audios feature sounds of every step of the preparation of all the recipes. Additionally, I present a text about Joseph Beuys and his interest in the politics and poetics of food that includes one of his cookbooks/pieces.

The sounds, illustrations and recipes presented in this book aim to connect the readers with the circumstances of resistance and adversity in which they were cooked. Cooking and eating in this book are presented as actions of alterity and otherness in which the spectator can expand its kitchen and table in poetic demonstrations of solidarity with the resistance of the vulnerable and unprivileged against adversity.