Building on the Radical Kitchen programme launched in 2017, this third season deepens our connections through food. The invited groups meet with visitors over a picnic to discuss the ways in which they create sustainable projects and campaigns in their communities. Themes of care, solidarity and resilience run throughout the work of the groups, who tackle issues as diverse as poverty, migration and community empowerment.
The first Recipes For Change features Micro Rainbow International (MRI), a UK based social enterprise that supports lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and intersex (LGBTI) people to improve their livelihoods by setting up small businesses, finding training and jobs. It has replicated its model in the UK, Brazil and Cambodia and continues to share their work at the Pavilion. For the last year artist Ain Bailey has been working with MRI as part of Serpentine Projects to explore questions of memory, sound and migration.
Every year MRI provides a lifeline to hundreds of LGBTI refugees and asylum seekers who come from one of the 75 countries in the world where homosexuality is illegal. Research shows that LGBTI refugees lack safe housing, often living in shared accommodation with other refugees who can be hostile and homophobic and consequently suffer abuse and violence. It also shows that they face additional challenges integrating into wider society that are not faced by the general refugee population; for example they are shunned by their own families and ethnic and religious communities in the UK. This makes LGBTI refugees extremely isolated and in turn more vulnerable to poverty and destitution as they have no one to turn to.
