Queer and unidentified gender identities are as intertwined with object relations and performativity as the nuclear family is. We alter, subvert and dysfunctionalize the social practices connected with those spaces to create new connections between the kitchen and the hospital, the street and the bedroom.

What does raising your fist have to do with cutting herbs? Can perhaps the cucumber help us to understand? Has the flying tomato any potential for enlightenment? And if throwing the bones left from the chicken won’t show you your fortune, could they at least become a means for disagreement?

A kitchen will be installed in the exhibition space and used to exercise different domestic functions. We will prepare food and discourse for the visitors; and deconstruct the kitchen apparatus to make it available for our purposes. We will make use of the intimacy attached to the private kitchen, but not to aim for an illusion of community, rather to test its reproductive functions on the level of bodies and identities. The premise is, that things receive their meaning through the way they are used. The nuclear family certainly shaped the meaning of kitchen and bedroom. We want to inquire the gender and sexuality related technologies of the kitchen and believe that Dr. J.H. Kellogg story therefore is a good amplifier. He not only invented Cornflakes as part of the diet in his christian sanatorium, but as well chastity belts to prevent non-reproductive sexuality. The domestic environment takes hold of every aspect of the subject and works like a closed-circuit factory with no final product, but the need to repeatedly pass production line. Often the attempt to escape ends where it started at a kitchen table. We test different relations with the objects like workers in a laboratory, who use themselves as test persons to build bodies that do not pass.

The opening assembly and performance “How to CUT Onions with your fist UP” will as well be the installment of important parts of the exhibition. Neither will we give a lecture nor simply serve dinner, but rather create a discourse-machine with an output as material, yet temporary as food. There will be testimonies from the Campton’s Cafeteria and the Stonewall riots recited. Somewhere in the background short looped scenes from fictional films will be screened on dismantled panels from the stove. When the performance is over the objects will be left in the space. Then they might keep their newly gained meaning or remain without any, either case they are just there to be re-appropriated.

History isn’t past only, but future as well and we shape it by the way we approach it. Cooking and eating, talking and listening could create such an approach. The kitchen is the perfect place to talk but also to get a taste of what it feels like to fight, to loose and to remember what the fighting was for. “Do you remember when we…” “Oh, yes! The pepper, please.”

Things receive their meaning through the way they are used. The nuclear family certainly shaped the meaning of kitchen and bedroom. Queer identity is as interwined with object relations and performativity as the nuclear family. We alter, subvert and dysfunctionalize the social practices connected with those spaces, and thus create new connections between the kitchen and the hospital, the street and the bedroom. When the performance is over the objects will be left in the space. Then they might continue talking as what we made them to be or maybe they just remain things, which lost their meaning waiting for another re-appropriation.

We won’t give a lecture, but rather create a discourse-machine – one of course, which will prepare food as well. The sources among others are from Marcuse’s writings about sexual liberation, as well as dialogs from Bertolucci’s movie “Dreamers,” all turning the street fight into a polysexual love affair. The machine will quote Beatrice Preciados instructions for contra-sexual practices, while cutting the onions. It will read out loud paragraphs from Lee Edelman’s “no future,” testemonies from the stonewall riots and other texts negotiating the re/production of bodies and sexual norms.

Mixed media © Lasse Lau & Flo Maak