Free School

A series of practices gather around the kitchen table, a space for sharing food and the culmination of a history of domestic labour that is often invisible. It is the place where storytelling and conversations converge. This year’s Free School starts from this concrete space, investigating forms of knowledge that flourish around the kitchen table and grow beyond it. In 1983, a group of women in Affori, Italy, created a feminist school that circulated through their kitchens, reclaiming alternative and emancipatory models of self-education. Some forty years later, Around the Kitchen Table celebrates these subversive models of domestic pedagogy with a free, temporary school. The 2024 programme features a series of workshops with Samah Hijawi on the relation between food and life occasions; A life worth living, a 4-day course that collectively reexamines care and domestic work; The School of Conviviality: Dumpling Tales with Mirra Markhaëva/Globe Aroma and ruangrupa/GudSkul; a lecture by Sara Ahmed; and a series of talks. In the history of bourgeois architecture, the kitchen has often been an invisible spot. Here, it appears at the core of the Festival Centre: a living place where the production and sharing of knowledge are brought together, open to all.

website by lvh