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 2: Shumi Bose on Giving Ourselves Permission to Navigate Unknowns, Radical Pedagogy, and Purpose Over Productivity
Shumi Bose is an educator, curator and editor in the field of architecture and architectural history. She’s the chief editor of Koozarch and a Senior Lecturer in architectural history at Central Saint Martins, the Royal College of Art, the Architectural Association and the School of Architecture at Syracuse University in London.
In this conversation we explore being the historians of our childhoods and what it means to read and observe space. Shumi guides us into living purpose over productivity; radical pedagogies through Audre Lorde and bell hooks; the need for spaces that allow us to flow as opposed to spaces guided by financialization; navigating unknowns and how leaning into uncertainty can move us into empathy.
It was such a joy to speak with Shumi. She lives what she speaks and in fact leads with so much generosity. We speak about the purpose of generosity (in the world, in her classrooms) and how that becomes a material practice of “sharing stories and building context”.
I hope you 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