Building on the Radical Kitchen: Recipes for Building Community and Creating Change programme launched in 2017, Serpentine presented a second season of its lunchtime gatherings in the Serpentine Pavilion, designed by Frida Escobedo. On Thursday 9 August, researcher Angus Cameron addressed extraction, mercury, policy and the global financial system.
On selected Thursdays over the summer, artists, activists and researchers gathered with the public to consider different global foodstuffs and elements – their stories, their movements and their relationship to time, empire and landscape. Visitors were invited to share food and reflect on empire, geological time, exchange and decolonisation, themes inspired by Escobedo’s design, which draws on the domestic architecture of her native Mexico and British materials and context, specifically the Prime Meridian line at the Royal Observatory.
Each lunchtime session focused on a different element or food item, tracing how ingredients such as sugar, grains and chilli have shaped the globalised world, and how consumption, exchange, politics and economics determine – and are determined by – these elements.
Radical Kitchen 2018 brought together questions generated through two major research strands undertaken by Serpentine Projects. The ongoing Rights to the City programme addresses housing rights, racial discrimination, privatisation of public space and the politics of care. Launching in 2018, General Ecology marks the Serpentine Galleries’ commitment to addressing questions around ecology, complexity, organisation and climate change.
Angus Cameron is an academic who has spent the past 25 years wandering through a range of disciplines, stealing whatever seemed of interest. Themes acquired and explored include boundaries, islands, money, devils, witches, fools, tricksters and mercury. His overarching interests are ambiguity and accident – born of the strong suspicion that for all we think we are in charge of things, we are fooling only ourselves. Cameron has also spent the past decade collaborating with performance artists. As ‘spokesperson’ for Goldin+Senneby’s project Headless, he has addressed audiences all over the world on the connections between finance, art, sovereignty, decapitation and monkeys.
Radical Kitchen 2018 is a collaboration with Nicoletta Fiorucci, Founder of Fiorucci Art Trust, and is supported by Aesop.
