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Architects: Andrés Jaque / Office for Political Innovation
- Year: 2022
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Photographs:José Hevia
Text description provided by the architects. Cooking, digesting, growing, and decomposing are all the same: an alliance between different forms of life. The Transspecies Kitchen is a project by Andrés Jaque / Office for Political Innovation, now installed at the Middleheim Museum in Antwerp (Belgium). It resulted from a long process that started in 2021, as an association between the NY and Madrid-based office OFFPOLINN and the stone fabrication company M-Marble Project. It is a kitchen that decarbonizes cooking and relies on fermentation as the primary form of food preparation.
This kitchen is part of a long-running dedication of the Office for Political Innovation to interrogate the architecture of eating processes from an eco-political perspective (including the 2003 ‘Techno-Human’ project, the 2007 ‘1 Liter Oil Banquet’, and the 2019 hybrid space ‘RunRunRun’ in Madrid).
The ‘Transspecies Kitchen’. Kitchening is less physical than ecological and political. Kitchening is the realm of collective living. It is evidence for the impossibility of individual life. As such, the ultimate form of kitchening is zymology (bacteria and fungi-based fermentation). The Transspecies Kitchen is an outing of digestion, as an infrastructure where the politics of life-making are intervened by post-carbon cooking.
The Transspecies Kitchen is produced out of pieces of marble thrown off as waste by the stone extraction industry. Only 30% of stones extracted in quarries are industrially used; the rest is immediately converted to waste. The Transspecies Kitchen challenges the industry’s waste-making, by recirculating and activating the material value of what was previously disposed of. Stones are barely transformed to become part of the Transspecies Kitchen. No other materials that the stone itself is added. An architectural strategy founded on rawness, that aligns with the kitchening strategy and invites bodies, communities, and territories alike to step back from industrialization and waste-making.
This post-carbon kitchen operates as a collective intestine that shows that metabolism is not an independent process. Instead, metabolism is a collectively constituted process dependent on more-than-human alliances. The Transspecies Kitchen dilutes the boundaries between kitchening, eating, and decomposing, which comprise a continuum of molecular progression.
Starting in July 2024, and during the entire Summer, the Transspecies Kitchen is installed and active in the forest of the Middelheim Museum in Antwerp. The kitchen is used as the site for Antwerphagia, the act of eating and being eaten by/Antwerp’s ecosystems. At the moment when toxicity in the soil, and climate- crisis shape Flanders’ politics, the Antwerphagia is intended to provide alternative transspecies alliances based on mutual care. These alliances are humanly sensed as taste, smell, intoxication, euphoria, sleepiness, drowsiness, dyspepsia, being high, flatulence, diarrhea, heartburn, acidity, and intolerance. Our kitchen is not fuelled by gas, nor by electricity. Transspecies kitchening is the art of counting energy out of molecular sociability.
