The Kitchen is a Story We Tell with Meenakshi Thirukode is a one-day intensive (but fun!) writing workshop on food, memory, and storytelling.
Date: Dec 7th 2025
Location: at Indica, New Delhi
Time: 10:30 am to 5 pm
Mode: in-person
Limited spots! We’re keeping it small, warm, and conversational.
A note on what to expect on the day
The workshop is designed to move gently between conversation and reflection to create a space that feels intimate, inclusive, and unhurried. The role of the facilitator is to guide rather than instruct: to listen deeply, prompt thoughtfully, and encourage participants to trust their own memories and sensory experiences.
Food can bring up tenderness, nostalgia, and sometimes loss; the space should allow for these emotions to surface respectfully. We’ll emphasize story-sharing over critique, and curiosity over correctness. Participants need not see themselves as “writers”. The goal is to find language that feels true to the memory, and to begin to understand how everyday experiences of food can become cultural archives in themselves.
First Half — Thinking and Sensing the Archive
In the morning, we’ll begin by exploring how food can be understood as an archive. A space where memory, culture, and lived experience are stored, shared, and transformed.
We’ll look at a few examples of artists and cultural projects that work with food as a form of archival practice from community recipe projects to art collectives that use cooking and storytelling to preserve local knowledge.
Participants will be invited to think about their own connections to food, memory, and culture to begin identifying personal “archives” they might want to explore in writing.
Second Half — Writing and Making the Archive
The afternoon will move from discussion to a space where they write, reflect, and share. Participants will experiment with writing that combines recipe, story, and reflection.
The second half of the workshop is a quieter and more introspective space for slow thinking and collaborative listening. Participants will be invited to share short excerpts of their work, exchange feedback, and reflect together on what their writing reveals about how food archives shape cultural identity and belonging.
Writing Outcome
✨ Two new pieces of writing
✨ A deeper sense of how food holds memory
✨ A shared experience of storytelling and reflection
✨ A community around the table
Would you like for us to offer this workshop online in the future? Let us know by taking our survey here.
FACILITATOR
Meenakshi Thirukode is a writer and artist exploring the intersecting histories of politics, resistance and visual culture. Her areas of research focus on the role of micro-politics, culture and collectivity within the realm of a techno-capitalist, transient network of individuals and institutions. Her recent projects include ‘Kitchen Table Talks’ (2023); ‘Disorganizing Metabolisms’ in collaboration with Food, Art, Research Network (2022); the ‘Here, There and Everywhere’ conference at MAC Birmingham (2018); and ‘Out of Turn, Being Together Otherwise’, exploring performance art histories in collaboration with Asia Art Archive at Serendipity Arts Festival, Goa (2018). Her chapter ‘Towards a Public of the Otherwise’, has been published in the Routledge Companion Series for Art in the Public Realm (2020). She was a Reading Resident and a contributor to the seminar US: Shaping Time at Stroom Den Haag, Hague (2022). She is the founder of School of Instituting Otherwise.
CO-FACILITATOR
Nawaz Gul Qanungo is a Kashmiri journalist and writer. He graduated from Asian College of Journalism, Chennai, and earned his MFA in Creative Writing from Minnesota State University, Mankato, where he received the 2022 Innovation in Teaching Writing Award. As an editor, he has worked with Business Standard, Kashmir Reader, The Polis Project, and Blue Earth Review. His essays have appeared in anthologies by Penguin India (2011), Haymarket US (2013), Himal South Asia (2014), HarperCollins India (2019), and Malupu India (2020) while his journalistic work has appeared in various publications including The Times of India, The Hindu, Dinamalar, The Caravan, Tehelka, Biblio, Dawn, The Friday Times, Scroll, Open Democracy, Socialist Worker, Kashmir Times, Down to Earth, and Fountain Ink.