What?
The Kitchen Project is a web-based archive of stories of diasporic Asian femmes on their relationship to food, kitchen, and maternal figures. The archive was designed and developed under a MAGIC grant from Columbia University and Stanford University's Brown Institute of Media Innovation.
The project began as an oral history initiative exploring the relationship between Asian food culture and racial discrimination, particularly the rise of anti-Asian hate crimes against the femme Asian community.
As the number of stories recorded grew, the question of archiving — and the power it holds over the stories and narrators — appeared. How can the gendered work of caretaking be complicated and preserved while uplifting the stories of diasporic Asian mothers, daughters, and non-binary children concerning food and care?
Our response was to develop an archive emphasizing co-creation, community, and ethical journalistic and archival practices. While most oral history archives rely solely on audio, transcripts, and indexing, the Kitchen Project opts for a multi-media approach, that emphasizes the images, references, and moments lost through traditional archiving practices.
In our kitchen, reminiscent of early Windows computers, each narrator is represented by a folder containing an audio file — a sound collage of their oral history sessions — and various images, videos, and notes. Initially, all media is unavailable. As users progress through a narrator's story, pieces of media will appear onscreen in response to the ongoing conversation.
Listen to the archive here open_in_new.
You are (not) invited
In addition to the archive, the Kitchen Project hosted a series of exhibitions and workshops.
You Are (Not) Invited and You Are (Not) Invited II were installations held between 2023 and 2024 in NYC, featuring clips from narrators and art from local diasporic Asian, femme artists.
Beyond the archive
To provide updates on the project and its upcoming events and workshops, I built a simple, notice-board-esque project site open_in_new, as well as a series of promotional social media graphics
Pieces for sale and bio of artists featured in You Are (Not) Invited II
Social media graphics for Kitchen Project events
Team
The Kitchen Project exists thanks to the amazing MAGIC grant team: Ariel Urim Chung, Anthony Sertel Dean, and Eunice Kim, as well as all of our collaborators and narrators.