Witch Institute

Design Workshop for the Socioeconomic Membrane that Enfolds her Casserole Dish

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Stream began August 22, 2021 8:00 PM UTC
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It's the year 2192. You have been invited to lunch at a small restaurant nestled within an e-waste dump in downtown Berlin. The restaurant is run by five witches who slipped through the veil to escape medieval witch hunts and have been thoughtfully advancing their relationship-based material transformation technologies ever since. They would like to discuss franchising opportunities with you over lunch. Together, you will sit down to a meal seeped into the kitchen from the surrounding dump through layers of magic and time, reworking dysfunction into material kinship and creamy pleasure.


The session will begin with a history of kitchen design as a membrane between the molecules of body and environment. We will trace the domestic tools, appliances, and utilities that have modulated our bodies' needs and desires, and the metabolic rifts between them propagated via capitalist-patriarchal enlightenment belief. Next we will introduce a draft set of principles for witches' kitchen design, working to derive comestible power from intimacy rather than control, from partnership rather than exploitation, and from ritual rather than speed or efficiency. Together we will then test out the principals, prototyping the creation of this new kind of work space for feminist technologies. We will meet for lunch in our imagined witches’ kitchen at the center of the dump to experiment with what we might cook for lunch there, how and why. After the design charrette, we will all discuss our findings to distill new understandings and possibilities for the witch and her kitchen, enriched by the experience of the workshop and by the collective sharing and troubling of ideas across the broader symposium.


Please Note: this event will be recorded.


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