Kitchen Revolution

7pm. £30 (including a Belarusian feast home cooked to our family recipes and complimentary wine). This event is now sold out.

Join us for the next Kitchen Revolution supper club – an intimate evening of dinner, debate and dissent, curated by Belarus Free Theatre.

Kitchen Revolution is a series of evenings that combine supper and secrecy, all served with a dash of sedition. Guests will enjoy a feast of home-cooked Soviet food and wine accompanying a lively discussion on the theme of climate and environment.

In the dark days of the Soviet Union, dissidents and intellectuals would gather in each other’s homes to talk, argue and dream about one thing – freedom. These whispered conversations, which would have been deemed treasonous if held in public, ultimately coalesced into actions which helped overthrow the repressive Soviet system. This was nicknamed the ‘kitchen revolution’.

Decades later and a world away, Britain’s hard-won freedoms are being eroded, as too many of us sink into political apathy, and a stultifying conservatism envelops the creative arts. It’s time for a new and more public kitchen revolution, time to turn up the volume on the kitchen table whispers of the past, and to encourage everyone to consider how artists should respond when democracy comes under threat.

Provocateurs on the night

The two provocateurs are: journalist and film-maker Leah Borromeo and advocate and artist Suzanne Dhaliwal. The theme for the evening is The fight against climate change: top down or bottom up and is chaired by Judith Knight, Director of Artsadmin, and Natalia Kaliada, co-founder and Artistic Director of Belarus Free Theatre.

Leah Borromeo is a journalist and filmmaker at the crossroads of art and journalism. A former international news editor described as “redolent with mischief”, much of her work involves public and private space, social architectures, the environment and language. As a co-founder of Disobedient, the projects she works on are journalistic in purpose and creative in process. In addition to developing broadcast ideas for multiple platforms, she leads on the creation and development of ‘Climate Symphony’ – a data sonification project that takes narratives from climate change data and tells the story of our warming planet through sound. It aims to see if sound can be used as journalism. Some of the folks Leah has worked with within and without Disobedient include the V&A, Serpentine Galleries, the Barbican Centre, Arko Art Center Seoul, Steirischer Herbst, CPH:LAB, Sheffield Doc/Fest, IDFA, ARCHIP Prague, Architectural Association School of Architecture, Al Jazeera English, The Guardian, Little Atoms, The Index on Censorship, Channel 4, Channel 4 News, CBC, BBC, The British Journal of Photography, The Atlantic, Tank Magazine, Open Democracy, Amnesty International, Greenpeace, Juxtapoz, APTN, Private Eye, Popbitch, Resonance FM and the rest of the liberal metropolitan elite….

“As the number of climate migrants around the world increases, it's clear that human rights are environmental rights. You cannot be ethical without considering the rights of people and the planet we live on. Kitchen Revolution seeks to agitate, provoke and catalyse the thoughts and actions of individuals to have a greater effect on the collective. We have damaged the planet past the point of recovery and it seems to me the question should be about how the human race chooses to die – kindly and with dignity, or choking in the acrid smoke of cruelty and suffering.”
– Leah Borromeo

Suzanne Dhaliwal has served as co-founder and director of the UK Tar Sands Network, which has challenged BP and Shell investments in the Canadian Tar Sands in solidarity with frontline indigenous communities, since 2009. She has also led campaigns and artistic interventions to challenge investment in the Arctic and Nigeria. She has lectured at Oxford University on white supremacy in environmentalism, and she recently joined the Mothers of Invention podcast team at the British Film Institute/Doc Society as social media and impact producer and climate advisor.

“We hear so much about climate change and the world of activism but what we hear less about is the indigenous, black and brown women who are the force, labour and genius behind many of the most powerful climate movements of our time. How do we begin to imagine a truly decolonial, intersectional and holistic future for a planet fighting patriarchy and climate crisis, and who needs to be at the table to craft that vision for a future that will be different to the white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal vision which has pushed our planet and communities this far?”
– Suzanne Dhaliwal

Part of Season for Change, a UK-wide programme of cultural responses celebrating the environment and inspiring urgent action on climate change.

Please visit our Booking Information page for more information on our venue and our refund policy. You can let us know your access requirements ahead of time by emailing access@artsadmin.co.uk.

25 October 2018

Please note
This is now a past event.

Venue

Toynbee Studios
28 Commercial Street
London, E1 6AB
Tel: 020 7247 5102
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Kitchen Revolution

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