The Kitchen Network (2024-ongoing)
How do we cook through turmoil, migration, and extinction?
From avocado toast to baked feta pasta, our relationship with food is increasingly shaped by social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok. Hashtags such as #TikTokFood and #Foodtok have gained billions of views, sparking surges of interest in certain ingredients and causing long queues at restaurants. As we consume food content on screens – whether through reality TV shows or viral trends – the realities of food production and its environmental impact have been hidden under digital layers of gold-leaf everything, long, melty strands of cheese, and dramatic reality TV storylines. With soaring energy and food costs, labour shortages, the cost-of-living crisis and ongoing supply chain issues, we eat with our eyes and ears. Food as entertainment is a geopolitical issue, masked and filtered through camera lenses to perform wealth, virtue, goodness, practicality, ease and skill.
The Kitchen Network is a performance and cooking show that delves into the politics of food as entertainment. Unfolding as an episode in the final reality TV food competition on Earth, this performance piece uses humour to examine the divide between online food cultures and their disconnection to wider issues of class, gender, and geography.
The Kitchen Network: Season 1, Episode 1 premiered at transmediale, at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin in January 2024. Episode 2 took place at Primary, in Nottingham, in April 2024. Episode 3 will be performed at the Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin, in October 2024.