Kitchen Flex
Kitchen Flex is a podcast, archive, space and dialogue that aims to deconstruct and re-construct the workings of architecture, at the same time. Descending directly from the project: Annotations (2023) which began at interrupting the modernist trajectory of architecture to re-story, re-frame, and re-interpret the built environment through a pre-colonial lens—Kitchen Flex extends the pre-colonial into the decolonial to bring to surface the immaterialities of architecture and world building. Immaterialities such as storytelling, mythologies, spirituality, sound and embodiment which were central to pre-colonial African and Indigenous ways of building to the point that the immaterial became material—the word becomes world.
In conversation with Victoria, guests are invited into an embodied dialogue to discuss these immaterialities and world-building potentials. It is no longer enough to critique but to move towards dreaming, radical imagination and the ways in which re-tooling our current circumstances not only disrupts colonial infrastructures but guides us towards the sustainable, equal and just future we desire.
Kitchen Flex is a rehearsal for living. It embodies the format or the methods of the global black community who are able to make place out of space, now matter where you go in the world and no matter what the circumstances are.This ability to kick it, hang out, create something out of nothing, revel in pleasures and joys, becomes a pedagogical practice. In this space we share stories, we teach our dances, we allow wisdom to transcend and we feel freedom on a deeply somatic level. We feel what freedom feels like and through that feeling, these conversations, these rehearsals—we allow freedom to take hold.
Kitchen Flex Podcast Team:
Host: Victoria McKenzie
Producer: Thomas Tawanda Orbon
Graphics and Visual Language: Martin Escalante
Original Music by Giorgos Kapagogos and Dimitris Kyriakou
Kitchen Flex
Episode 1: Mayis Rukel on Our Collective ‘No’, the Power of Stories and the Role of the Artist
Mayis Rukel is an artist, writer and filmmaker empowered by and working with the foundations of radical Black queer feminism, embodied social justice, emergent strategy and so much more.
In this conversation we explore the power and need for embodying our collective ‘No’ and recognizing what we stand for. Mayis recounts his childhood, taking us through the architectures which left an impression upon him; the radicality of being a child and meeting your inner child; a sense of purpose as an artist that developed in him at a very young age and what it means to follow your purpose no matter what.
Mayis recalls the making of his film ‘Movement Song’ which is a documentary-fiction narrative following the legacies and archives of James Baldwin. From this project, Mayis takes us into the world of an artist who chooses to uphold stories.
Enjoy!
Kitchen Flex Podcast Team:
Host: Victoria McKenzie
Producer: Thomas Tawanda Orbon
Graphics and Visual Language: Martin Escalante
Original Music by Giorgos Karamanlis and Dimitris Kyriakou