2021 Cosmopolitan Cookbook
In the second year, the group continued to work in the context of an exhibition design practice class for second-year students of Fine Art Theory lead by dr Tünde Varga. This time, the doctoral students worked closely with the young Hungarian students for half a year. In the seminar discussions, the Hungarian students developed a set of questions to explore the art education, the art system and the concept or perception of art in the country of each doctoral student.
As covid closures were in place, they were able to meet only in pairs for the interview. Group discussions took place in the online space. However, the cultural exchange between students proved to be very good. Both parties' cultural knowledge resulted in a serious learning process that went beyond the acquisition of artistic knowledge. It also had the added benefit of helping to build lasting relationships. As the possibility of organizing an exhibition was doubtful, we thought about forms that could be realized both online and in an exhibition space. Again, a playful form was chosen to show cultural diversity. We planned a community cooking and cultural day for a public event, along the publication of a creative-art form of a recipe book of the planned dishes (the Contemporary Cosmopolitan Cookbook). Finally, due to the lockdown we had to stick to the cookbook. Two text forms were the basis of the cookbook: On the one hand, the interviews with the artists so as to show the diversity of art education and artistic thinking outside Europe in an intercultural dialogue, highlighting the most interesting aspects of each culture for Hungarian students. On the other hand, the recipes which were organised in a very unique way: the artists presented a recipe that he or she likes and considers culturally relevant in a way that points to an interesting or important cultural issue in his or her home country, and the outlay of the recipe was the artwork itself. The themes of the cookbook were also dominated by non-European cultural views, like. indigenous life in Brazil through manioc production, or religious and gendered connotations of preparing Syrian bread, or politically burdened childhood experiences of post-war Georgia. The aim was to facilitate self-esteem through the process, to gain experience from looking at each other's cultures, to facilitate transcultural learning, to socialise, to be a community, to help each other and to promote culture.
Read the Cookbook here