Slow Cooking

Featuring: Sonia Sandhu ✶ Selina Thompson ✶ Toni-Dee Paul ✶ Rebecca Moradalizadeh ✶ Guya ✶ Untethered Magic ✶ Estabrak / إستبرق

Welcome to Slow Cooking, a new multimedia podcast exploring the relationship between art making processes, communal food practices and contemporary colonial impacts around food and environmentalism.

Hosted and conceptualised by Xavier de Sousa, with sound work by Olive Mondegreen and video work by Richard Warburton and Kibe Wangunyu, Slow Cooking invites artists who have a history of migration and also work with food-making and food-sharing as creative tools: Rebecca Moradalizadeh, Estabrak / إستبرق, Toni-Dee Paul, Selina Thompson, Guya, Untethered Magic and Sonia Sandhu.

One of the wonderful things about food eating is the activation of memories. Just like the smell of petrichor, it takes you to a place of comfort, activates memories that have marked you, even if you might have long forgotten them. Memories that have shaped you and which can ground you, and in your community. It brings perspective and collectivity, thus allowing us to dream about possible futures. 

Throughout these episodes, we chew through a wide range of research and provocations, from art-making processes and food as a creative practice, to the impact of Western colonialism on seed-sharing practices and ancestral agriculture in indigenous communities in Kenya, to how the poetic and nurturing relationship with pomegranates in West Asia has been co-opted by Western militarisation in the region.

For this first season, we traveled to Bradford and London (UK), Porto (Portugal) and Ongata Rongai (Nairobi, Kenya) to meet each artist, and spend the day buying food from local markets and independent shops, then cooking together and share it with you while discussing what brings these artists to the table.

Below you will find each episode’s own page, which include edited and captioned video episodes as well as the full-length conversations in sound-podcast formats, accompanied by edited text versions of the conversations. Just follow the links below for each episode, sit down, get a cuppa and enjoy!

Bom apetite 👩🏼‍🍳

Slow Cooking with Estabrak / إستبرق – Episode 1

Link to episode page

Slow Cooking with Rebecca Moradalizadeh – Episode 2

Link to episode page

Slow Cooking with Guya & Untethered Magic – Episode 3

Link to episode page

Slow Cooking with Selina Thompson & Toni-Dee Paul – Episode 4

Link to episode page

Slow Cooking with Sonia Sandhu – Episode 5

Link to episode page

Slow Cooking Team

Conceived and Hosted by Xavier de Sousa
Artists/Chefs: Rebecca Moradalizadeh, Estabrak / إستبرق, Toni-Dee Paul, Selina Thompson, Guya, Untethered Magic and Sonia Sandhu
Video work by Richard Warburton and Kibe Wangunyu
Video editing by Richard Warburton and Baiba Sprance
Sound work by Olive Mondegreen
Production support from Lydia Tissier
Strategic Producing & Consultancy by The Uncultured

Commissioned by Theatre in the Mill, Migrant Actions Productions and performingborders
Digital Broadcast by HowlRound Theatre Commons
Supported by Untethered Magic, Migrant Projects CIC, Bradford University. Additional funding by Arts Council England and Necessity Fund.

Special thank yous to Daniel Pinheiro, Arelene Wandera, Munish Wadhia, Ayza Akhtar, Shabina Aslam, Amy Sharrocks

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