Workshop

Inspired by Dorothy Iannone’s A Cookbook, made in 1969, the writer María Arranz proposes a workshop aimed at the creation of a collective recipe book. Based on a survey of the literary and artistic works of different creators who have made cooking a focal point of their lives, Arranz invites us to take part in a space designed to identify connections between the world of food and other fields like creation and writing that combine art, food and life.

In A Cookbook, Dorothy Iannone shows us that a collection of recipes can reflect not only daily life but the author’s existential musings. While a recipe book can be intimate and introspective, it also speaks to us of domestic and popular culture, of the time and place in which it was compiled. On loose sheets of paper, in notebooks or in published works; with or without drawings; with notes in the margins; with stains and splashes or pristine; inserted with tips honed from years of trial and error, or with precise instructions that leave no room for improvisation. A recipe book reveals many things and therefore demands attentive reading, much more attentive than has historically been granted to these texts. In this workshop we’ll talk, reflect on, discuss and, above all, read recipes, relating these readings to Dorothy’s work and those of other artists and authors who have also found a unique form of expression and thought in cooking.

María Arranz is a writer and a journalist specialising in cultural, feminist and gastronomic topics. A regular contributor on gastronomy to media like El País, she is the author of El delantal y la maza (Col&Col ediciones), an essay about the role of women in the kitchen from a feminist perspective. Among many other interests, in 2013 she founded FUET Magazine, which examines the relationships between food and culture, and she was a member of Cocinar Madrid, a multidisciplinary collective that uses cooking as a tool of anthropological research.

The shelter, retreating to the shelter 
the cave, the cave
the sound box between the shelter walls
the acoustics of the drawings
there where it sounds
we’ve been here for eight years and never sung a full song 

Beyond the end we have never sung
of those lost to the river
from the river to sea
cocorococo

Beyond the urgency-attention
uncertain-subtle-unfinished-unspeakable-invisible
attention intention
being in the phase, in the 3rd phase, not of autonomy but of self-management 
corococo coco cocorococuuuuuuuu

Beyond a new gentleness
that must be invented 
becoming a body of affectations
a beast of a thousand heads with a thousand tongues
reemerges in the shelter of the cave

An amateur choir is a creative project in which any kind of voice is welcome to participate. Every other Thursday, we do our own research sessions as well as sessions with artists who work with voice and listening.

Session dates of An Amateur Choir 2026

15 January / 29 January / 12 February / 26 February / 12 March / 26 March / 9 April / 23 April / 7 May / 21 May / 4 June / 18 June / 1 October / 15 October / 29 October / 5 November / 19 November / 3 December / 17 December.

Those who have come in the past:

An Amateur Choir has featured Sonia Megías, Itziar Okariz, Jaume Ferrete, María Salgado and Fran MM Cabeza de Vaca, Rocío Márquez, Alma Söderberg, Ainara Lagardon, Jhana Beat, Juan G. Araque (Juan Dresán) and Lolita Versache, Luz Prado, Los Torreznos, Makiko Kitago, Julián Mayorga, Agnès Pe, Paloma Carrasco, Anto Rodríguez, Elisa C. Martín, Elena Murcia Pinto with Marina Peralta Murcia, Inma Marín with Jon Cañal and Tania Arias Winogradow with Milo-Andrey Ulises, Rolando San Martín, Amalia Fernández, Elena Córdoba, Raquel G. Ibáñez, Alex Reynolds, Black Tulip, tacoderaya, Mónica Valenciano, Ruth Abellán and Arturo Moya, Ojo Último, Monserrat Palacios and Fátima Miranda, Sole Parody, Enrico Dau Yang Wey, Coco Moya, Veza Fernández, Patricia Leguina, Jesús Burrola, Noela Covelo, Stina Force, Los Cramps (Nilo+Francisco), Ángela Segovia, Eddi Circa + raxet1, E1000, El Gato with Jotas, Nilo Gallego, Tavi Gallart, Hijas de Yocasta, Amaia Bono and Damián Montesdeoca, Piccola, Bea Narcoleptica and Elan d’Orphium.

Are the sounds of silence driving you crazy? Banish them and come and invoke the spirit of Lolita Versache and Samuel Mariño with us.

Come with your voice, you’ll be fine, you’ll be fine. It’s all fine with your voice, it’s all fine with your choir.

Voices, voracious mouths. We bawl, bellow, bleat and be heard. Come on, don’t be shy. Come onnnn!!!

Footless, headless beast of many mouths, an otherworldly body that bellows noiselessly with shrieks and spasms. The house gets drenched, my lips close and you all come.

Decontextualisation of sound and silence. Silence after the din or gasping for breath after the din? Silence gasping for breath, the din yet to come.

Maybe all this after it all ends.

An amateur choir is a creative project in which any kind of voice is welcome to participate. Every other Thursday, the choir does its own research sessions as well as sessions with artists who work with voice and listening.  

Our Amateur Choir has featured Sonia Megías, Itziar Okáriz, Jaume Ferrete, María Salgado and Fran MM Cabeza de Vaca, Rocío Márquez, Alma Söderberg, Ainara Lagardon, Jhana Beat, Lolita Versache, Bea Narcoléptica, Luz Prado, Los Torreznos, Makiko Kitago, Julián Mayorga, Agnès Pe, Paloma Carrasco, Anto Rodríguez, Elisa C. Martín, Elena Murcia Pinto with Marina Peralta Murcia, Inma Marín with Jon Cañal and Tania Arias Winogradow with Milo-Andrey Ulises, Rolando San Martín, Amalia Fernández, Elena Córdoba, Raquel G. Ibáñez, Alex Reynolds, Black Tulip, tacoderaya, Mónica Valenciano, Ruth Abellán and Arturo Moya, Ojo Último, Monserrat Palacios and Fátima Miranda, Sole Parody, Enrico Dau Yang Wey, Coco Moya, Veza Fernández, Patricia Leguina, Jesús Burrola and Noela Covelo.     

Our migrants’ suitcases are filled with twenty-three kilos of life per crossing. Overweight again? What do you carry when you go? When you come back? Yerba mate to while away the time? Coca leaf to blow on God? How much does a house weigh? Did you squirrel away enough money to bring your dog? Was the skin of the soursop still bristly when you unpacked it? What does your baggage smell like? In these four sessions, we’ll be pulp and seed, green and travel, tenderness and bark to recount the southerly-to-southerly winds that blow over the invented territory of the diaspora. Four encounters to open the soursop (not the melon) and use storytelling to explore the interstices of all our creatures/children.

We invite you to journey through this writing laboratory made up of four interconnected sessions led by Sudakasa: Lucrecia Masson, Gabriela Wiener, Chinî and Hildy Quintanilla Ocampo (Q´inti- Colibrí).

The workshop dates are:

• Friday 29 November 6:30–8:30 pm
• Saturday 30 November 12–2 pm
• Friday 13 December 6:30–8:30 pm
• Saturday 14 December 12–2 pm

Participants must attend three of the four sessions to earn an attendance certificate.

Sudakasa is a community writing and creation space based on migrant experiences; it is a refuge-home and artistic residence that has come to cover our lack of a ‘people’, because our people are across the sea. We have re-appropriated this parcel of olive and almond trees and grapevines from insult and turned it into body, identity and memory of the diasporas so together we can weave other stories of resistance that confront the violences against those from down under.

Lucrecia Masson Córdoba. With impurity as a principle, she is a writer, artist and researcher whose main topics of inquiry are bodies, animalities and other-than-humans. From an anti-colonial stance, she works in different artistic registers, primarily experimenting with writing. What interests her in theory is imagination, and she willingly believes that we cannot think without the body. She published Epistemología rumiante (2017) and Escrituras rumiantes. Cuerpo, exceso, animalidad (2022) and has participated in numerous anthologies. She is a member of the Colectivo Ayllu, with whom she has published Devuélvannos el oro (2018) and participated in events like the Sydney Biennial (2020 and the 35th São Paulo Biennial (2023).

Gabriela Wiener. She is a Peruvian writer and journalist living in Madrid. She has published the books Sexografías, Llamada perdida, Nueve Lunas, Huaco retrato and Dicen de mí and the poetry collections Ejercicios para el endurecimiento del espíritu and Una pequeña fiesta llamada eternidad. Her first stories were published in the narrative journalism magazine Etiqueta Negra. She was a columnist for The New York Times in Spanish and the editor-in-chief of Marie Claire España and has contributed to many international media. She publishes a weekly column for publico.es. She won the National Journalism Award in Peru with a report on a case of gender violence. She is the creator of different performances that she has staged with her family. She wrote and starred in the play Qué locura enamorarme yo de ti. She is a member of@Sudakasa, a collective migrant art and writing project. Undiscovered, the English translation of her novel Huaco retrato, was a finalist for the 2024 International Booker Prize and PEN America. @gabrielawiener

Chinî. She was born in Ka'aguasu, Paraguay, in 1987 during the Alfredo Stroessner dictatorship. She is a poet and marica 108, studied biology and researches frogs and toads from Piribebuy. She migrated to Madrid in 2019, following her mother and sister. She has been a Guaraní Jopará speaker since childhood and adores tereré and mbeju. Professionally, she is currently an arborist and keeps watch over the El Pardo forests in Tres Cantos. She is working on her poetry collection Corpus infecciosa/ 30 comprimidos/ suspensión oral, which examines the wound of HIV-AIDS, migratory sorrow and the traumas of a healthy-ill body. She thinks that the virus has come to her body to rummage through her past and heals it with plant-based remedies. She has been dreaming in Guaraní from the Paraguayan city of Ka'aguasu surrounded by soy harvests and the absence of her mother.

Hildy Quintanilla Ocampo (Q´inti- Colibrí). She is a stage creator, poet, willakuq (storyteller), researcher of Andean theatricalities and oralities and a Qoyllirit’i pilgrim as part of the Quispicanchi nation. In Madrid, she is developing the self-managed Arguedas, Oraliteca Migrante project, which brings Andean and Latin America orality and literature and teaches the Quechua language via Escuelachallay, my little Quechua school in Madrid, as practices that aim to strengthen migrant identities and intercultural dialogue in Spain.

Odd Dance is a workshop for all kinds of bodies with all types of experience on dance floors and in festivals and ballrooms, where you can practise classical couple dances in a trio. It’s harder to keep the beat and steps of a dance with three people dancing, but this is precisely what makes us learn new ways of moving.

Odd Dance is a workshop where the simple action-question of translating classic couple dances for two into trio dances for three, or five, or seven, will provide us with the framework of joint investigation and creation in which we’ll get in touch with each other and our own bodies, the bodies of others and the world around us using movement and dance as a means of bonding and creative expression.

Oihana Altube is a dancer and choreographer who is also trained in dance movement therapy. She works on the margins of dance and the live arts.