Kitchen Lab: Spilling One’s Guts / Deep Fry Together

This paper reflects upon 5 years of experience with the ‘Kitchen Lab’ format of hybrid exploratory practice, which includes home kitchen, bioarts, everyday life and food cultures. Everyday kitchen practices that have long cultural heritage traditions, and combined with DIY and networked Do-It-With-Others, these kitchen-based experiments and artists inspired by food or practices related, have a long history. The paper introduces the context of practice, but focuses more on the background stories to what is made in the kitchen, that of a home. The author presents as the main body in autoethnographic style a first-person narrative in 2 parts: A deep frying action which connects memories, friends and colleagues in networks, and the reflections of staying at home over many years, but also recently in Spring 2020 during the Global Coronavirus COVID-19 Pandemic period in an artist studio kitchen in Finland. It involves narrating the value of a home and a kitchen to do one’s practice, as well as the different cultural histories and experiences spanning various locations and times. The article concludes that as situated knowledge, it reveals many external issues to the usual making of food dishes or experiments, and considers the sensitivity and responsibility for opening up, and ‘spilling one’s guts’ about the background stories of practice-led research.