The first workshop of the series “Making tools for tomorrow” took place at Verhalenhuis Rotterdam on 31May, coinciding with the community’s Dragonboat festival celebration. In this edition, titled “Fermenting Futures”, we took a critical look at our modern kitchen and discussed how we can relearn techniques such as fermentation, sun-dried method, salt-brining for convivial futures. We got our hands dirty (and salty!) by making syrups, pickle cucumbers and much more with produces from neighborhood market at Afrikaandermarkt. We brought up the concept of “convivial re-tooling” from Ivan Illich to guide us through the workshop. It was inspiring to meet enthusiastic peers and learn about fermentation together. We believe that our participants brought home with them not just the lovely pickles but also a different perspective on food – in the spirit of conviviality. Here are some guiding questions we discussed with during the workshop: What is your relationship with fermentation? What ingredients do you need for fermentation? What does conviviality (living together) mean to you? Can you imagine a future without refrigerator?

The “Making tools for tomorrow” workshop series is a part of the “Open Kitchen pilot – CONVIVIUM: New European Bauhaus Solutions in Food, Living Heritage, and Conviviality”, a three-year Horizon Europe project co-led by Utrecht University and Nieuwe Instituut. It interrogates the kitchen as a spatial ensemble of standardized parts embedded in urban technological systems, identifying tools beyond gadgetry but also culinary knowledge and emplaced experience, ultimately imagining a convivial assemblage of a regenerative kitchen practice.

This workshop series underscores the importance of “making” in reclaiming our agency in dominant food systems, that is, through twitching the “tools” we reshape the social relations they mediate, vis-à-vis the history-long query of an ideal “tomorrow” in modern European societies that nonetheless still motivates the politics of the present.