Round Table Cooking: The Neighbourhood Meeting is the title for a public event in Oslo, Tøyen, in the small park at the end of Håkan’s gate. The event will be organised as a neighbourhood meeting on a Sunday afternoon. 

The event is based on cooking a soup together, where each guest contributes one ingredient, typical or special  for our “neighborhood soup”. While cutting, preparing and cooking we will also open up some questions related to our neighborhood’s present situation and its possible future; for e.g, who are our neighbours? How much do we know each other? Can we as neighbours support and respect each other regardless of differences, working together towards creating a strong community, helping each other and enjoy the benefits of cultural diversity? 

Through this meal, we are aiming to create a space where varying opinions can be shared, discussed and debated. 

The event is a cooperation between Apolonija Šušteršič, Sarah Kazmi, with Njokobok (Youssou Diop).

The language of the event will be a mix: Norwegian, English, Urdu, Arabic.

29th August 16-19

Håkons gate park

Sarah Kazmi (Pakistan, Norway) is an interdisciplinary artist, writer and a researcher. Through the lens of food as an artistic medium, she uses anthropological and participatory action research (PAR) to disseminate her practice, investigating socio-political change within personal and community-based rituals. Her practice incorporates texts, poetry, audio, live readings, installations and image-based works to explore circulation processes of food as strategy for communication and knowledge production, its significance in our everyday life, beyond a consumption culture. 

Apolonija Šušteršič (Slovenia, Norway ) is a visual artist, artchitect, researcher, writer and teacher, the last three years based in Oslo. Her research-based practice is situated, cross-polinating different fields of spatial practice and critial theory with projects that would activate cooperation between people or groups of people, usually focusing at the complexity and issues related to our living environment.

She is involved together with Youssou Diop (Senegal, Norway) and others to conceptualize NJOKOBOK as a project that also includes the neighbourhood resturant in Tøyen (supported by Tøyen Unlimited). 

NJOKOBOK as a project started in Slovenia / Senegal already in 2016 as a social and educational project: creating a dormitory for the street kids in Senegal as a final goal, where the mayor part of education is related to learning skills of ecological farming, organized as a community activity and a fare-trade economy run by local cooperative. 

The neighborhood restaurant in Tøyen (Norway) is the essential part of the project: to establish cooperation between different parts of the world, growing ecological food / ingredients used in the Senegalese dishes, produced in Norway, or Senegal. The idea is emphasizing the processes of   exchange of knowledges and experiences in order to relate and contribute to a wider understanding and acceptance of each other’s cultures, traditions and ways of life.