Tongue Twisting Dinners is a series of four monthly dinners hosted by Eathouse. They explore ways of initiating critical dialogue around contemporary urgencies by bringing people and culinary practice together. For each session Eathouse will host a different topic elaborated by guests whose research will guide the dialogue. The dinners will try out unconventional formats that attempt to dissolve the separation between host, guest and audience through inclusive prompts.

The conversation during the third Tongue Twisting Dinner focused on gardening and composting on an urban scale as methodologies for living through ecological crises. Eathouse invited guests Four Siblings (Müge Yılmaz, Marija Šujica, Emiel Wolf) to talk about their edible living labyrinth in Amsterdam Nieuw West and Kate Price & Guillem S. Arquer, who will discuss their recent research into communities within Rotterdam engaged in making compost.

These projects rethink our relationship to plantlife and soil, giving us resources for creating sustainable and biodiverse spaces. By exploring the cycles of growth and decay, they seek shared modes of existence between the human and more-than-human, based on practices of belonging and coexistence.

About the guests:

Kate Price is an artist and gardener from Naarm (Melbourne), Australia, currently working and wiggling in Rotterdam. Within her practice is a curiosity towards the manoeuvres we make singularly and collectively within our environs. Drawing from her upbringing on a horticultural farm in Australia and present solo and communal gardening activities, she is currently exploring how gardening practices can facilitate moments of exchange, reciprocity and relationship fostering between divergent beings.

Guillem S. Arquer's research and practice develops from a deep interest in site-specificity, improvisation and the poetic materiality of found objects. He is interested in the conceptual and technological infrastructures that support the bipolar world-views that obfuscate the connection of the human species with the Earth's ecosystems. Alongside his research interest in 'naturecultures', he tries to reimagine and develop what an art practice tuned to more-than-human worlds can be. He obtained his FA Bachelor Degree at Universitat de Barcelona and graduated from the MFA at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam, where he resides. His work has been presented individually and collectively in Spain and in the Netherlands in institutions, galleries and artist-run spaces.

Four Siblings is a public garden and a community project initiated by Marija Šujica, Müge Yilmaz. It will grow in the shape of a labyrinth in the Nieuw-West district of Amsterdam (Tuinen van West). The garden created a contextual space for art, social gatherings, and performances during the summer of 2021 and it is having a second edition in 2023.

Eathouse is an artist cooking collective set up in 2020 by Ulufer Çelik, Merve Kılıçer, Vlada Predelina, and Jake Caleb. In their practice they explore the potential of food as an artistic method. They do this to instigate dialogue on ways that the culinary informs the social. They have hosted public events, kitchen takeovers, fundraisers and online broadcasts. In addition they invite other artists engaging with food to share their research with a wider audience. They are based in Rotterdam, NL.

Tongue Twisting Dinners has been kindly supported by CBK Rotterdam and Gemeente Rotterdam.
Graphic Design: Studio Lieneman
Photos: Sophie Bates