I originally wrote this as part of my diary series in summer 2022 while on residency at NART, Estonia with Kreenholm Plants, and after some editing sent it to Well Projects for their brilliant Seeking Channels publication (pictured) which you can still buy here. I love being able to hash out texts in the moment then revisit them with fresh eyes and pick apart or remodel.
I read part of this text last Sunday at The Field as we sat at the table with a huge lunch spread I prepared for our monthly crit day with guests Yelena Popova, Ryan Boultbee and artists from Gloam Gallery (Sheffield).
Featuring: Billy Crosby & Sian Newlove-Drew, Bones Tan Jones & Nicolette Clara Iles, Dayna Casey, El Hardwick, Feral Practice, Georgia May Jaeckle, Georgie Hurst, Dr Helen Greaves, Hannan Jones & Shamica Ruddock, Holly White, Ibiye Camp, Milo Creese, Sean Roy Parker, and Kris Lock.
Sun 19 Jun
I wake up naturally and am immediately coaxed into lifting heavy shit with Alexey, the technician at Narva Art Residency [NART], who is visibly hungover. We resentfully drag huge mdf boards out of the main gallery space and transfer them to storage so Jaakko [Autio, artist] can begin installing his sound piece. It’s also the last day of Reconfiguring Territories [RT], run by Finnish duo, architect Kaisa Karvinen and design researcher Tommi Vasko, so elsewhere others are packing, cleaning and saying goodbye. Once the bulk has left we open a bottle of prosecco with Katie [RT participant] —who lauds her own decision to leave later without the disorganised rabble— and add a few cherries, lilac flowers and ice cubes in our tumblers. We all share lunch ordered in from the restaurant at the castle, which arrives moments after Katie dashes for their train; Potato dauphinoise; Steamed eel in mustard sauce; Marinated beetroot, mint and feta; A box of paprika wedges; Three slices of bread and various pots of sour cream and herb butter.
Amid dishing up we begin to talk about the labour involved in arts organising, particularly relating to food and feeding participants within a structured programme like a residency or LARP. Kaisa is telling me about the history of the NART building – the former villa of John Carr, Kreenholm Textiles factory's (British) technical director who lived there in the late 1800s. She explains it had, and still has, entire rooms and staircases separate from the main public spaces so that servants were able to move between the facilities without making contact with inhabitants or visitors.
The kitchens, bathrooms and basement (which would have been a cellar before the renovation) were purposefully hidden from the public, with food or drinks just appearing when they were needed. Perhaps more significantly, this also meant that housework —exclusively performed by women and specifically hospitality tasks— could be carried out inconspicuously, with food appearing and empty glasses disappearing as if by magic. This deliberate obfuscation of gendered domestic labour not only reinforced imbued misogyny and class structure through the distinction in roles of the hosts from workers, moreover it prevented the expertise of the cooks and cleaners from being publicly appreciated and created a mirage of effortlessness that allowed the host to collect compliments and social capital.
Although I’m writing in half-imagined history, the same enforced labour hierarchy is still thriving today in many industries, and for men too. The well-oiled capitalist machines of agricultural food growing, hospitality businesses, retail services and online shopping rely entirely on the suppression of manual work in order to fulfil customer expectations and transactions, without fair pay-off or thanks, and almost totally ignoring their direct negative effects on mental health. As we’re seeing with current strike action across Britain by unionised rail workers, postal services and nursing professionals, their public protestations and labour withdrawal reveals the dysfunction of our abstracted capitalist reality through broken supply chains and infrastructure breakdown. Like Heidegger’s “zuhanden” (ready-at-hand), the ignorance-is-bliss flow of everyday life is invisible, and only becomes apparent when it is broken or interrupted, shaking us out of a stupor and creating a heightened sense of presence through personified inconvenience.
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Back to the field of institutional art production and organising, it would not be preposterous to say that food and drink is, other than customary symbolic tipples and nibbles, barely even an after-thought. In an ongoing performance of hospitality, feeding guests is prioritised over feeding art workers. For artists, techs, invigilators, and managers alike, unless supremely organised with a packed lunch, their in-work meals are generally grabbed in a rush from a nearby coffee shop, fast food establishment or supermarket, or bought with a slight discount from an on-site third party business. Pulling a late one to get an exhibition up may be slightly softened with a couple of pizzas and some beers; It may also be used as emotional leverage by bosses to retroactively claw back labour or favours.
Though examples disprove the rule, this systematic outsourcing of sustaining workers’ energy levels is industry standard — an accepted norm where employers take no responsibility for feeding their staff or freelancers, refuse to meet a basic human need, and expect them to pay for lunch out of their own time and money.
In Estonia, I’ve seen something quite surprising. Tommi Vasko and Kaisa Karvinen, working together under the name Trojan Horse, received funding from KONE Foundation in Finland to carry out their three year-long project at NART, inviting artists from across Europe to spend one intensive week together in the border city. For their 2022 summer school they factored in the cost of employing an artist-cook to take care of two or three communal meals a day. Jana, a self-proclaimed kitchen militant who demands potentially helpful people leave the zone, was informed of everyone’s intolerances and preferences in advance and presented with a budget for the week (booze has to be organised totally separate from RT).
Handing payment and responsibility to a committed individual takes pressure off organisers and gives structure or relief to already packed days. Furthermore, it ensures a clear task separation, which tends to be murky in horizontal group activities and naturally falls to similar people each time.
Perhaps the most significant outcome of this centralised, communal dining is how it negates the need for fragmented, time-inefficient, and wasteful trips to the supermarket, and ensures there is no pressure on those from lower socio-economic backgrounds to exacerbate a (possibly) already expensive situation. Keeping regular meals free includes everyone, and keeping them in-house allowed the cook certain creative freedoms. In this instance, Jana would have been too pressed for time, but it’s possible this model could have incorporated anti-capitalist methodologies –foraging, bin-diving, harvesting from gardens, buying from independents (babushkas etc)– which complement the programme's central concept of reimagining the city.
With a paid cook, the infrastructure of art production is brought to the foreground. As time-history repeatedly shows us, eating together provides a necessary framework for bonding, relaxing and organising. We saw this in the National Kitchens and British Restaurants of post-war Britain which saw volunteers feed thousands heartily yet cheaply with locally-grown produce until they were disbanded by the Government. We still see it today in non-Western religious cultures in which members receive, cook and serve food as part of their daily practice, like Buddhism's Round of Alms, and the Sikhist concept of 'langar'. The significance of "non-Western" is in its resistance to the West's neoliberal and actual degradation of communal dining to make way for hyper-privatised restaurants and take-away habits that hide shady ingredient provenance and outright labour oppression.
At Reconfiguring Territories it has been clear who cooked so it’s clear who to thank publicly or in private. It has no doubt made net savings on money, timekeeping, plastic waste, washing-up water, leftover food. It has eliminated poor communication, potential misunderstandings, mass indecision. Although not every meal will have been quite to everyone’s taste, the cook embodies the responsibility to provide variation, sometimes with humour (for example the incredible võileivatort (Estonian sandwich cake – an 80s throwback). The organisers’ humble but fundamental choice have enriched the conceptual threads of the programme, engendering the spirit of radical collectivism which are bound softly to self-organising each other's nourishment as a way of meeting the group’s most basic needs.
Fri 8 Jul
A few day ago, Johanna [Director of NART] asked me in passing if I would like to “cook food for a party NART is throwing at Narva Venice” on Saturday. I slept on it then asked for more specifics, to which she embellished: “a barbecue for 70-100 people”. I have only ever thrown a few veggie bbqs for friends so laughed a little at how casual it was made to sound. Was I making a big deal of nothing, or was the tall request being played down? After establishing that they had essentially volunteered me for two days work, I advocate for myself, renegotiate the terms of payment and take it on fully, excited by what the fuck might happen. How am I meant to know what Russian carnivores like to eat? Stress is kept at bay by challenges that help growth.
I write a rough shopping list and we drive to the supermarket in the morning. I try really hard not to have a meltdown in Rimi by dissociating and doing everything at double-speed and reward myself with some kombucha. I spend the whole afternoon prepping, with Christina [a fellow resident at NART] joining me half-way through;
Butchering pork and turkey. I’ve rarely eaten meat in the past decade, let alone cooked it, so watch a few quick youtube how-tos. It’s not at all hard or disgusting and To me, the disconnect between meat-eaters and the work needed to prepare it seems further beyond pure physicality, into the complete disembodiment of food from its source, and the refusal to take on the labour that is seen as grotesque. If I am to partake in purchasing, preparing or eating meat – and especially if I cannot get it from a responsible source – the bare minimum I can do is break it down myself in order to spend intimate time with it and develop an understanding of the process. I will use every morsel we bought so look up a few ideas for the offcuts too. Once all the pork steaks are cut, I cube the trim for lardons and break down all the remaining fat to render in the oven overnight.
Marinating meats. I come up with one for each meat based on materials we already have in the residency fridge and some of the by-products from my own experiments. The long pork steaks go into a shallow tray with a mixture of lactofermented potato brine and shop-bought pickled cucumber liquor from the back of the cupboard (with some fresh garlic, herbs and a few peppercorns), and into the fridge covered with foil to rest overnight. I prep the huge turkey breasts for shashlik by chopping them into rough inch cubes. The marinade is kefir, pesto, lemon juice and zest, salt and pepper. This all sits in a plastic lidded box overnight in the fridge too.
Chopping fruit and herbs for salad. The basement fridge had a selection of apples, so I buy watermelon and oranges from the supermarket. I always get herbs from the babushkas outside Maxima, so on the way back from Rimi we stop off to clear them of their lovely parsley, basil, lemon balm, peppermint, spring onions and dill. Christina picks all the herbs from their stalks and finely chops them, then does a nice small dice for the fruit. We add a tiny bit of salt but no dressing for now.
Fermenting and pickling vegetables. I also get about 2.5kg of baby cukes from the trestle table of a guy sitting in the boot of his estate car. I slice them thinly longways and make a fresh liquor with 1:1 apple cider vinegar and water, a few tbsp of sugar and one of salt. I chop a few white onions into rounds, mince a few garlic cloves, and throw everything into a big glass jar. I chopped and submerged the potatoes in 4% brine with garlic and thyme last night to give them extra time to ferment. The plan is to roast them in the morning and reheat them on the bbq in a baking tray.
Herb butter. Johanna’s suggestion. Christina let the blocks melt slightly in the sun, then mashed the rest of the herbs in with some fancy salt and squidged it into a plastic tub to set in the fridge.
Bread. Bought from Rimi as an afterthought: a few bags of large sliced white bloomers and some small sliced rye tin loaves.
Once Christina and I finish prep and precariously balance everything in the residents’ fridges, far later in the afternoon than anticipated, Kevin [a resident at Narva Venice] turns up to inform me that Aleksandr [chairman of Narva Venice Association] is warming his sauna for my arrival. I do as I’m expected. When I arrive, I clearly state I will only stay a little while, proceed to take a shot of vodka with a pickle, eat some salami, get thrashed by Aleksandr with a birch brush in the hand-built steam room, take more shots of vodka, thrash Kevin with a birch brush in the hand-built steam room. As I’m about to get thrashed by Kevin, he pulls me out because Aleksandr has waved down a guy driving a speedboat and convinced him to give us a ride. The gent, who is wearing just his t-shirt, underpants and a captain’s hat, pelts it down the concrete canal and at one point stands up to shout “Titanic!” over the europop being played from a portable speaker.
Sat 9 Jul
Luckily I remembered to set an alarm, and get up to roast the lactofermented potatoes while having porridge and jam with a coffee. I then move all the containers of meats and pickles into some bread trays ready to load into the car. I still don’t know what food for 70 people looks like.
We arrive at Kulgu, known locally as Narva Venice, a network of man-made canals that lead out into a reservoir that adjoins Estonian and Russian territories, with powerlines buzzing overhead. Lining the bodies of water, densely populated with plants, frogs and fish, squat around 700 garages containing workshops, fishing equipment, gardening tools, old boats and even saunas and makeshift lodgings.
We unload the crates, as well as all the bread, paper plates and cases of drinking water we left in the car. There are like 5 or 6 people down here, some volunteers from NART and a few locals; we get three tents up pretty quickly but forgo the walls as the wind is up right now. As Johanna returns from collecting a barbeque pit from the city, we unload the huge iron trough from the boot of her estate and set it down on the gravel. Dense, dark grey clouds have been moving in for the past twenty minutes and now unload an almighty torrent on us. Aleksandr is adamant it will be over in another twenty minutes so we just continue setting up tables and unrolling electronics cables. I have a few volunteers with me on the food department so we set the barbeque up on its legs and Lotte cleans the old ash out while Christina arranges two tables (one waist height and one chest height) to complete the U-shape formation. As I’m standing at the barbeque, all my cooking equipment and food prep is on the low table to my right, and the bread, pickles, butter, and eating instruments are behind me on the higher one, along with an eight litre water dispenser with citrus slices and wild herbs floating around.
I start looking at all the wet things: the new lake on the carpark floor, my crocs and socks, the barbecue trough, the coal, my hands holding some coal. Lotte rightly says we should start the fire in the small round barbeque, which is dry, so we start igniting paper wicks and firelighters in an attempt to get the flames to catch on the coals. A few false starts later, it’s good. Immediately, an old dude with an unbuttoned check shirt over a grey vest and a beaten baseball cap storms in with cardboard, coals and lighter fluid. He is speaking in Russian and I believe him. The cardboard gets ripped up and stuffed in the base of the trough, then without warning he lifts up the portable barbecue and tips the pre-existing small fire onto the cardboard. He pulls a few logs from a sack and props them up diagonally, tucking coals in the gaps and adding cardboard with one hand to keep the initial flames going, and wafting the small fire with another flap of cardboard in his other hand. Just for the drama he squirts fluid into the materials and nearly melts the tent, but it’s all under control, apparently. I think it’s important to report on this because I genuinely would have been there all day trying to get the fire going while everyone watched painfully, and his expertise is something valuable.
As the fuel settles in and Vladimir performatively grabs a deck chair, Kevin cleans the grilling iron down and I begin to skewer the shashlik. Aleksandr brings me a shot of vodka and a pickle for good luck.
Once the meat is starting to char, I flip it with a pair of scissor tongs and rotate the skewers. A few locals are starting to hover around the high table; I offer them a slice of bread with herb butter and pickles which garner a few thumbs up and smiles. The elders are wearing captains’ hats like the guy on the boat and I decide I really need one. I write a menu in English and have a volunteer translate it to Russian for me and stick them both on the front edge of the table with masking tape.
The first flush of grilled meat is ready and I transfer it onto a metal tray on the high table where Christina is standing, ready to break it down. She starts to make a plate up for a punter, pointing at the bowls of food and waiting for a head nod or shake. The man wants everything. A steady stream of short older ladies with plates already in their hands and they also get the full monty. Meanwhile, I’m getting another batch of pork steaks and shashlik ready for the grill, drinking a beer and chatting to a musician. I am living out a bit of a dream if I’m honest; doing my first outdoor barbecue for a party of unimpressed-looking Russian locals in a carpark is not something I would have put money on. Although there are only about thirty of them, most ate two full plates and cleared all morsels from the tables. Nothing like selling out.
As I’m cleaning down, I receive expression of validation that I didn’t know I needed: I explain to Vladimir (and Lotte translates) as he eats the last potato wedge on his plate, that they were fermented with garlic and herbs for two days before roasting, and he licks his lips in the most comical, satisfied way I’ve ever seen except in cartoons. He then demands Lotte take a photo of us together, wraps his arm around my shoulder and uses the inside of his forearm to squeeze me while grinning widely.
Fascinating as usual!