Sancochotopia: A Winter Ultrahospitality Mini Garage School

Two days of workshops and conversations organized by Escuela de Garaje.
Part of the field work for Ultradependent Public School (01 April–27 May 2023).

DAY 1 
Getting and arranging the ingredients. 

WHEN: Friday, 10 March 2023, 12:00–18:00 hrs 
WHERE: BAK, Pauwstraat 13A, 3512 TG Utrecht  
WHAT: The first day of the Winter Mini Garage School! We will start by having lunch to get to know each other through sharing food, recipes, and histories. In the spirit of a paseo de olla (literal translation: pot stroll) we will then discuss the possible recipe for the sancocho to be cooked on Saturday, the possible ingredients, and where to get them. For that, we will get to know Lombok—the neighborhood of De Voorkamer, the space where we will be hosted on the second day of the garage school—and its history by doing a Migrantour. The day will finish with a remixing session: collective recipe writing, collaging, and other forms of memory work to digest the day.  

DAY 2 
Starting the fire and mounting the pot. 

WHEN: Saturday, 11 March 2023, 10:00–18:00 hrs 
WHERE: De Voorkamer, Kanaalstraat 225, Utrecht  
WHAT: Time to get the sancocho going! We will work together on the elaboration of a mantel piece that will present some of the questions that emerged during our conversations in the escuela (school). Everybody who attends the feast will be invited to participate. This piece will become the memory of our emotional sancocho. We will finish the day with a music set from DJ Anadolu Ekspres (Cengiz Mengüç) “exploring the fringes of contemporary and past-time pop music from Turkey and its diaspora.” 

HOW 

These two days function as a school rather than a series of traditional presentations and clearly sectioned-off events. This school will unravel its curriculum in the experience of walking, sharing, and cooking together. Our approach will be active and engaged (but also chill).

Want to participate? We have one simple question that we would like you to answer (300 words max):  

What ingredient/root would you bring to a community pot, and why?

Send your response to oneriver@riseup.net before the 6th of March.

**We would prefer a commitment to both days of the program, but if you cannot, please specify how much time you can spend with us.

A WINTER ULTRAHOSPITALITY MINI GARAGE SCHOOL

The Winter Ultrahospitality Mini Garage School is a temporary cultural platform for diasporic affects and practice exchanges around the kitchen as a site of study. A place for those interested in working with food activists and agri-cultural workers, preparing and serving food as a way to gather community and enact communal forms of study. Particularly, our goal with this school is to exchange, smuggle, or try to translate recipes for survival by making connections with the ongoing research of the escuela de garaje and our network in Utrecht. 

The recipe we are proposing to strengthen this connection is a familiar one. Often, our community kitchens are organized around cooking sancocho, a traditional soup in several Latin American cuisines that has no “universal” recipe. Every region or locality has its own recipe: a combination of what is at hand, social relations, and stories. You could even say that from a sancocho it is possible to reconstruct not only the cultural history of a region, but also its economic and social entanglements. For us, it represents a way of doing that is situated, unassuming, and collective. 

The school will take place during two intense but informal days on 10 and 11 March. We will be joined by Juan Pablo Pacheco Bejarano from Espacio Comunal (Bogota/Maastricht), Lina Ruiz from Micelio Cultural (Colombia/Barcelona), Sergio Rojas Chaves (Costa Rica/Basel), Alice Strete (Varia, Fizz, Magiun), and Cengiz Mengüç (Anadolu Ekspres). 

 PROGRAM FRIDAY, 10 MARCH

12:00 Potluck 
13:00 Preliminary discussion on the recipe  
14:00 Lombok Migrantour 
16:00 Remixing session (Recipe writing as a form of memory/storytelling, understanding the biography of an ingredient, tracing the sancocho.) 

PROGRAM SATURDAY, 11 MARCH

11:00 Café, chocolate, and arepas (stuffed cornmeal cakes) 
12:00 Cooking  
14:00 Remixing 2: The finishing touches  
18:00 Sancocho 
19.00 DJ Anadolu Ekspres (Cengiz Mengüç) 

ULTRAHOSPITALITY

Since October 2022, seven study groups have been doing field work towards BAK Community Portal’s first large-scale public project, Ultradependent Public School (UPS), which opens from 01 April–27 May 2023.  

Ultradependent Public School unfolds as the public negotiation of a curriculum to learn what we really need to enact the worlds we really want. It is co-convened with an extended faculty of students, educators, and practitioners. Emphasizing study as a radically collective, public labor that lives in-between institutionalized hierarchies, UPS inhabits the edges between formal classrooms and everyday life. It navigates kitchens, print studios, housing squats, community centers, garages, radio stations, hallways, public transportation, and sidewalks as sites of study. 

Ultrahospitality is one of these field work nodes. It thinks through the kitchen as a space where study and political action meet: growing, preparing, and serving food to gather community through communal learning. Its fermented curriculum focuses on connecting food activists, agri-cultural workers, and food security advocates.    

Ultrahospitality is convened by Escuela de Garaje (Garage School), initiated in Bogotá in 2013 as an informal program that improvises with its structure, depending on subject and context. The school needs minimal-to-no infrastructural endowment and is interested in knowledge and tools that are considered irrelevant, of low quality, without official validity. The general objective of the school is to collectively unlearn freely and for free. This iteration of the escuela is hosted by Santiago Pinyol, an undisciplined artist who situates his practice on the coastlines of art and education. Responding to his context, he produces installations, interventions, cultural platforms, and ephemeral schools.   

THE FACILITATORS 

Sergio Rojas Chaves 

Sergio Rojas Chaves (Venezuela, 1992) is a Costa Rican artist based in Basel, Switzerland. Through sculptures, installations, video, photography, and performance, Rojas Chaves collaborates with non-human partners including plants and animals to question anthropocentrism through gift and affect. His projects have been part of individual and group exhibitions, most recently at Budapest Galèria, Macalline Art Center Beijing, MAI Riyadh, Kunsthaus Baselland, SALTS Basel, Kunsthalle Zurich, CAN Neuchatel, Kunstverein Langenhagen, MAFA Arad Romania, MADC San José, MAC Panama, Fundación Paiz Guatemala, TEOR/ética San José, and la cápsula in Zurich, among others. His work was also part of the 8th Biennale Gherdeina, the X Central American Biennial, and the 9th Bienal Inquieta Imagen, as well as the Reunion Performance Festival in Freetown, Sierra Leone and La Tigra, Honduras. 

Juan Pablo Pacheco 

Juan Pablo Pacheco (Bogotá, 1991) is an artist and writer driven by questions about the ecological interdependence of technology and territory, seeking to imagine media and mediations beyond extraction. Through texts, audiovisual projects, and participatory laboratories, his research delves into historical, material, mythological, and poetic relationships between technological infrastructures, water, and other planetary systems. Juan Pablo has taught in Colombia and the Netherlands and is currently a resident at the Jan Van Eyck Academy. 

Lina Ruiz 

Lina Ruiz (Bogotá, 1991) is a cultural mediator and empirical cook. Since 2022 she lives and works in Barcelona. She is linked to the organization Trànsit Projectes (https://www.transit.es/) from where she carries out tasks of formulation, research, design, and coordination of multidisciplinary projects focused on education and culture, at local and European levels. Her personal project Micelio Cultural (@miceliocultural) is at the intersection between art, culture, ecology, and cuisine. It is a space to think about food and how it relates to the world, thinking about the possibilities of making and producing together. Through storytelling, networking, and dissemination of activities, it is a platform for circulation and encounters between different cultural agents. Since February 2022 she is linked to La Cuina del Macba, a space for meeting and exchange of knowledge, culinary practice and research, questions, searches, and conversations around food, food sovereignty, the ecosocial crisis, and the transition to more sustainable ways of life.  

Alice Strete 

Alice Strete (Romania, 1991) is a Rotterdam-based artist and researcher interested in the intricate relationship between humans and the technologies they surround themselves with. Her work involves collaborative media art and publishing practices and explores topics from feminist technologies to the socio-politics of food. She is a member of the Varia collective, Fizz Club fermentation research collective and the food co-op Biobulkbende.  

Anadolu Ekspres 

Anadolu Ekspres is an event series, online platform, DJ handle, and low-key research project initiated by artist Cengiz Mengüç. Through club nights, public programs, DJ-sets, lectures, catering services, and visual output, Anadolu Ekspres has since 2015 been exploring the fringes of contemporary and past-time pop music from Turkey and its diaspora. Anadolu Ekspres has been to Atlas Electronic Festival, documenta fifteen, Milhões de Festa, Other Futures Festival, Paradiso, sonsbeek 20-24, and more.