Clandestine Cooking: Reality and dreams

In collaboration with Louisa Mammeri

Edible Art Experience at Tars Unlimited, Bangkok October 2025

Lecture Performance at Bangkok Art Book Fair, BACC, Bangkok December 2025 

How do people reclaim their agency in the most restricted environments? This work examined prisons as sites of biopower, where bodies are regulated through diet, temperature and movement. Outside the purview of the guards, however, inmates build alternative worlds where agency is regained through creative, clandestine cooking practices. Often relying on camaraderie, intricate agreements and makeshift tools, they recreate dishes and memories that become a doorway to the imagined outside.

Based on interviews with former political prisoners and secondary research, we developed an interactive exhibition that participants journeyed through. Starting with the reality of food in prison, they were then introduced to the interior worlds of inmates through a video projection while live cooking happened hidden behind a makeshift wall. This was followed by demonstrations of two former inmates who recreated cooking tools from their time in prison, leading to a shared dinner experience.

The work was later adapted as a lecture performance for the Bangkok Art Book Fair, presented in a shorter format alongside Sheree Ng, author of "When Cooking Was a Crime: Masak in the Singapore Prisons, 1970s–1980s”.