Life Kitchen (2025) is part of Featuring…, a series of collaborations, performances, and installations that stems from a profound belief that every human is inherently creative.
In 2024 Nadia Kaabi-Linke travelled to Tunis at the invitation of the exhibition space LA BOÎTE, not simply as a visitor, but as a local participant. The project redefines the roles within the art field, shifting the dynamic between viewers and artists. In her opinion, one of the distinction between artists and non-artists lies in memory: artists preserve the creativity they discovered in childhood, while others may forget, persuaded by the illusion that they lack talent. In collaboration with employees of a pharmaceutical company, she helped realise their own creative ideas. In Life Kitchen, the artist cooks alongside the author of the piece and speaks with him in Arabic, acting as mediator, tool, performer, without claiming authorship. Featuring… is not a traditional artist’s journey, but a radically conceptual work about authorship, identity, and creativity.
For ‘Life Kitchen’, artist Mohamed Hameda wrote a critique of Tunisia and his experience as an employee of a pharmaceutical company. Speaking of dysfunction in both his country and workplace, he recounts his day through food metaphors. Each emotion is compared to a different vegetable, spice, or traditional Tunisian dish.
“I want to cry, as if I were cutting onions…”
In this theatrical performance, Nadia Kaabi-Linke plays his wife, quietly preparing the ingredients as he speaks. What appears to be a casual kitchen conversation gradually reveals itself as a critique of deeper societal issues.
