session interview
about cuisine interne keuken

"We mean what a works, an organisation is made of: the components ingredients, the tools utensils, workplace, and work and creation processes recipes"

The Cuisine Interne Keuken project was initiated in 2004 at Jonctions/Verbindingen 7, a yearly festival around art, technology and ethics organised by Constantvzw, Brussels.
We selected 15 questions around the ingredients and recipes of cultural work. Some of these questions are quite straightforward, and some leave more space for interpretation or even evasion. The idea is to put practice, tools and conditions at the same level, so to question their interrelation.

Cuisine Interne Keuken started out of the desire to render visible the internal organisation of the cultural world we work in, with its written and unwritten laws, decision making processes and value systems. In our thinking about interdisciplinary cultural practices, we did not want to leave out the question of economy.

We started out by simply interviewing each guest to the Jonction/Verbindingen festival but after a while we found ourselves branching out to other contacts or people we met at conferences and lectures. The list of people interviewed therefore forms in a way the internal kitchen of the organisation Constant itself, and continues to expand and change.

Using the same set of questions over and over again helped us to focus a series of intimate conversations, and allowed a chain of interviewers in different settings and in multiple languages to bring their own background to the discussions. As a result in some cases answers were combined, questions not asked, or questions not answered but these 'flaws' actually became a marker of a rich and multi-layered process of research.

With more than 35 interviews soon accessible on this site, Cuisine Interne Keuken combines the rigor you might expect from an anthropological survey with the intimacy of private conversations. The adaptation of cooking language forms a deliberate move away from a more sensational "look behind the scenes", and from efficiency driven or technocratic terms in which design and art practices are mostly described in, if at all. It smells, it's messy, tickles the taste buds, fills the stomach but there's always a lot of dishes too. We offer them here to you for consulting, remixing, inspiration, learning and listening pleasure: a culinary jukebox of some sorts.


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