Cooking with LeftoversPepe Dayaw - Nowhere Kitchen

In 2012, while living in financial crisis stricken Madrid, Pepe Dayaw began a series of private dinners (es cena) involving going to people’s house and cooking their leftovers. Assuming the role of guest cook and armed with a spice kit, Pepe occupied homes and made dishes of what was found in people’s fridges and pantries. It soon evolved into an itinerant kitchen that can take place anywhere. The cooking process turns into a meditative exercise that invites those who participate to ruminate on the nourishments of precarious times, collectivity and on emergent futures of our own leftovers. It is a game that takes only one basic rule: cook what is there.

And that includes the bodies that are present, the objects that form part of the ritual, and the sentiments and desires that connect everyone to the space. From there, other rules and creativities are generated in-situ. What is cooked in a specific encounter is something that is shared by those present.

Since there are no recipes to follow, anyone can participate in the improvisation. This open partiture of cooking is what led for Nowhere Kitchen to become a collective of cooks, each one with their own stories and ways of improvising. While in Berlin, Pepe met other cooks who simply took part and found that they shared this philosophy in unique styles, making Nowhere Kitchen a project that has been growing organically: one of cooking leftovers as its philosophy and finding its heart in the encounter of many special cooks. There’s the cook and the dancer, the cook and the singer, the cook and the weaver interweaving their life together. That while too many cooks might spoil the dish, it creates a whole new something else.

Cooking with Leftover - TEDx