Teta's Kitchen

Part culinary exploration and part writing excavation, this programme invites participants into the kitchen of oral tradition. Together with Ahlan Club, the participants will sculpt and cook Teta’s Kofta recipe, a recipe passed down from a grandmother to her daughter and later to her daughter’s son. This recipe, that existed only orally and particularly to a grandmother’s kitchen explorations, became a vehicle through which to honour and continue a fragment of her legacy upon her ascension to heaven.

There are no measurements or a step-by-step guide. The meal was passed down belwayem (بيلوايم) — an Egyptian Arabic term referring to eyeballing ingredients and their measurements while cooking and adjusting accordingly; to literally measure and cook by hand and to learn its composition by observing its cooking and replicating it gesturally. Here, there is no codified structure of cooking, but of an attunement inherited. Following cooking Teta’s Kofta and breaking bread together, participants are invited to excavate their own oral food traditions by way of writing prompts, and to later translate these narratives into their own visual, linguistic, and mixed media explorations.

Each participant’s resulting work will automatically be considered for the first edition of The Living Archive (أرشيف العيش), which will focus on narratives surrounding oral traditions of food histories and will be invested in both archiving and contextualising these largely undocumented food histories.

Venue: Alserkal Arts Foundation, WH51, Alserkal Avenue (pin)
Time: 4PM - 8PM
Date: Sunday, 26 July 2026

Click here to RSVP.

The Living Archive is a developing collective digital and physical archive that is dedicated to the marginalised and largely oral native histories centred around food cultures and networks. It brings together indigenous cultural ephemera, traditions, and rituals that document and translate food, its networks, and cultures in and around the Global Majority.

Synthesising books and cookbooks, zines, magazines, and market ephemera, photos, audio, and videos, cultural ephemera relating to table preparations, food rituals, recipes, or even the

testimony of memories around food-making and its significance, the archive both situates food as a microcosm through which to document indigenous cultures, traditions, and interpersonal histories relating to land and community, and also serves as an emancipatory model for knowledge production, turning to oral histories as sources of verifiable truth and testimony. The Living Archive platforms the relationship between indigenous cultures, food, storytelling, and knowledge production, and is firmly invested in the documentation of these often overlooked histories as sources of both truth and fact.

As an open access archive, The Living Archive is committed to sustaining a community-led, independently-driven, and research-based framework, aiming to support critical engagement with native food cultures and networks, and to preserve the oral traditions and cultural ephemera of an often overlooked, fragmented, and marginalized histories that are at risk of disappearing or that, by the monolith and myth of history's standards, have already disappeared.

Andrew Riad (b. 2000, Cairo) is a Coptic Nubian Egyptian multidisciplinary artist and poet exploring the intersection of poetry, research, performance, and gesture. He works with archives, text, moving and still images, culinary happenings, and soundscapes to undo a monolithic history and propose a [re]imagined and silenced history revealing ostracized narratives as original sources of truth and fact. His projects imbue an emancipatory framework and understanding of language, of archive, and in that, gestures towards an opportunity for play and imagination to build towards what he calls a futurenarrative. For him, language is the experience of sound and ritual; of symbol and gesture and as such, is a site for resurrection, imagination, and [re]integration.

Riad started Ahlan Club to break bread together, to archive oral histories relating to our experience of gathering and rituals surrounding food. Ahlan Club co-creates with artists, collectives, writers, and farmers to build towards a collective archive rooted in our shared moments and our imagination.

The Kitchen As Studio unfolds through three-month cycles of convivial interventions, inviting culinary practitioners to activate the Foundation's kitchen through participatory meals that nourish curiosity, foster critical discourse through food, and keep the table open for whoever comes next.