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 3: Ramon Amaro on Fugitivity, Freedom and Remembering we are already in the Body
Dr Ramon Amaro is the Senior Researcher in Digital Culture at Nieuwe Instituut, the national institute for architecture, design and digital culture in The Netherlands. An engineer and sociologist by training, Ramon's writings, research and artistic practice emerge at the intersections of Black Study, digital culture, psychosocial study, and the critique of computational reason.
In this conversation we explore embodiment as a decolonial exercise. Ramon guides us through a historical and theoretical journey that moves gracefully through the power of psychologist Frantz Fanon. Ramon says “the beginning of healing [from trauma] is always the recognition of the lies–revealing the truth of what you’ve been telling yourself; then reconnecting with the body because the body has always been learning.” He so aptly reminds us that this is an individual task, as well as a societal task where the work becomes a means of sourcing justice in the body and in the world. He guides us into a discussion on freedom, the role of the fugitive, and language’s limitation.
It becomes clear that on a podcast about architecture, Dr. Ramon Amaro invited us into the architecture of the body.
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