Clandestine Cooking: Reality and dreams

In collaboration with Louisa Mammeri

Tars Unlimited, Bangkok 

2025

We enter the cell through the stomach.

At Tars Unlimited the air was thick, 32 °C, 85 % humidity — conditions calibrated to remind every pore of its captivity. Guests were first offered “care”: a ginger-nutmeg tincture to sterilize the palate, then a bowl of congee and boiled vegetables engineered for blandness. The body registered the message before the mind could protest: You are fuel, nothing more.

Then the lights dimmed, the guards looked away, and the real menu began.

Two former clandestine cooks—survivors of political prisons—took the floor. Between them sat a noodle-soup container and an empty juice bottle, now pestle and mortar. A disposable razor and a toothpaste tube had become a falafel press. Sunflower seeds, once rationed by the gram, were scattered across a table to read the future: How many seeds until release?

These objects are not props; they are evidence.

In regimes that govern through the regulation of calories, temperature, and movement, the kitchen becomes a site of resistance. A square of toilet paper soaked in butter burns long enough to brew coffee. Grapes, smuggled in socks, ferment into wine under a mattress. Each act is a refusal to be reduced to a body under surveillance.

Clandestine Cooking does not romanticize survival. It documents the ingenuity that blooms when the state attempts to starve the spirit. The bland congee is real; the falafel pressed inside a marker barrel is real. The divination game is real. The wine is real.

We invite you to taste both realities. One reminds you of control. The other reminds you that control is never absolute.