Fittja Kitchen Cookbook

The Fittja Kitchen Cookbook (Fittjakökets kokbok) gathers recipes and interviews from and with local and international artists from the last ten years they have been working with art and food. Artists have engaged local residents and their communities to build an outdoor oven, activate a container kitchen, host neighborhood food and art festivals, engage in vegetable gardening with youth, cook and eat together, gathering around food, art, and the stories they share.

Botkyrka konsthall, and their artist residency program Residence Botkyrka, is a municipal funded space for arts and culture located in Fiittja, a municipality in northern Botkyrka, a suburb of Stockholm. Stockholm is a segregated city: migrant and minority communities are forced into the suburbs, while white Swedes, expats, and upper class folks live closer to the city center. These suburb areas are often remnants of the Million Program, a large public housing program implemented in Sweden between 1965 and 1974 by the governing Swedish Social Democratic Party to ensure the availability of affordable, high-quality housing to all Swedish citizens.

However, today, because of neglect, privatisation and defunding, migration policies and stigmatization, these neighborhoods have been subject to racism, alienation, passivity, over policing, and narratives of crime, drug addiction, social vulnerability and exclusion. To counter this stigmatization, and to center the richness, complexity, beauty, and power of the förorten (the suburb), Botkyrka konsthall and Residence Botkyrka has been working and engaging with local communities through art and food.

With a shopping list from the gathered recipes in hand, we visited grocery stores from the suburbs to the center of town, gathering what we could find, seeking taste-a-likes or look-a-likes for those we couldn’t.

Food cultures sustain communities, but also hold the struggles and joys of broader political, social, economic, environmental, and historical conditions. We wrap ourselves and each other in names which trace communities, affinities, but also their re/de/composition[1]. How food packaging and labeling is wrapped up in all these stories, the vernacular of which inhabit our kitchens and our memories.

We repurposed and transfigured this vernacular, assembling another language to adorn the pages of this book. The gold holds shades of not only the jewelry, but also the memories and other opacities carried across borders, acknolwedging and honoring histories of immigration, reassemblage, and resilience.