“Every city, town o village preserves its own secret recipes that don ́t appear on official menus. It is food “al natural” that doesn ́t come from recipe books. It ́s food based on the “good hand” and wisdom that people acquire in the difficult art of eating and hunger. They are dishes that circulate the fringes of luxury restaurants, but they are authentic in flavour and origin....”
“Comidas y bebidas de Chile” Alfonso Alcalde 1972
© Valerie Frossard
La Cocina Pública is a method for the exchange, production and registration of culinary contents. A mobile kitchen, domestic and warm, housed in a shipping container, travels through neighbourhoods creating social encounters around a dining table.
It is a project in search of recipes and aromas that will unveil stories, remember characters, reveal intimate moments full of flavours and humanity. The main actors, the neighbours, jointly prepare their recipes for the diners, creating a delicious collective event, which creates an appreciation for the diverse culinary aesthetics, practices and customs of the inhabitants of the local area.
Valerie Frossard ©La Cocina Pública is an event that exists insofar as it is linked to the social environment in which it is installed. Therefore, despite having pre-set scenes and a script, it is an event that is flexible, a performance that adapts to and nurtures the environment and the people at each location. In this sense, the work locally prior to the installation that we do; the meetings with local people and the gathering of their stories is fundamental to the success of the event.
© Valerie Frossard
La cocina pública is a centre of production and cultural diffusion, inclusive, accessible and equalitarian. All of us have an intimate relationship with food. When deciding what to cook, when selecting the ingredients, when deciding how and when to combine them. The process of cooking is the same of the process of artistic creation. In the kitchen we can develop individual and collective creativity connected to our past, because we are the heirs of culinary traditions, bearers of secrets and ancestral practices.
The kitchen is a shared art.
© Indigo Pardo © Teatro Container
Methodology around the work
The work has 3 phases
The first phase is to make contact with local organisations, interview neighbours and find local people who are willing to take on key roles for the success of event (cooks, singers, poets, storytellers, sewers).
The second phase is the confirmation of a local team and the planning of the event (selecting recipes, poems, songs).
The third phase is the textile recycling workshop for community members
This happens during 4 days (depending on the context) before the big event. We use old material collected by the neighbours to create decorations and bunting for the main event the next day.
The work comes together on the last day with the presentation of all these elements of La cocina publica
Workshop in Vitry (FR)
Milton Keynes (UK)
Chile
© Indigo Pardo
Nicolás Eyzaguirre Artistic Director
