Food Performance by Salma Serry

A Food Performance by Salma Serry, followed by a talk

• 9th March 2022, 11 AM – 12 PM
• Atrium
• Upon Registration Only

Part One: Performance

How can we use historical cookbooks for the future? This performance lecture dissects yet combines various elements of historical cookbooks content, aesthetics, and semantics. It comprises an audio-visual aspect, and a reading of various cookbooks and recipes, interjected by commentary and notes. It situates various elements against larger socio-political, economic, class, and gender contexts and poses questions about systems of knowledge, race, colonialism, power dynamics, and identity politics. This way, we learn from the past by playfully examining a genre that is often overlooked.

Part Two: Talk

The talk approaches the topic of cookbooks as a published source material for research that enables an understanding of social, cultural, socio-political, and economic dimensions to the human condition at a given point. Aesthetic elements, design, illustrations, as well as the books’ content and context are put into conversation to understand the various ways food can and did influence the human condition while asking questions about the place and future of cookbooks in today’s digital world.

This event is an in-person event for the VCUarts Qatar community only.