July. 29th 2023
John Hendry Park, Trout Lake
3:00pm
Kitchen Codex is an ongoing, site-dependant food-centric project conceived by Patrick Cruz. This collaborative performance uses food and food making to facilitate knowledge sharing and reflect on personal and collective histories. Since 2015, this project has taken the form ofcommunal cooking and recipe sharing events. During each iteration of the project, recipes are collected from the community. These are subsequently compiled and printed into a textile cookbooks which get reused in future iterations of the project.
Kitchen Codex is an iterative work continually co-authored by the communities in which it takes place. Thus far it has occurred in Guelph, Ontario; Berlin, Germany; Sudbury, Ontario; Mexico City, Mexico; Malmö, Sweden; and Vancouver, British Columbia.
Description
During the 2023 LIVE Biennale, Cruz performed in a pop-up style kitchen on the grass next to Trout Lake. A range of food was prepared, cooked and shared onsite. As attendees ate and socialized, the food conjured memories of dishes from their own lives. Recipes were talked about and notes were compared, and by the end of the afternoon there was a pile of hand-written instructions to add to Cruz’s growing archive of community recipes.