During our residency at MARC, we have been gathering “found” ingredients, not bought, but foraged, offered, and the leftovers. From the forest to a stranger’s garden, the roadside of a housing block, the backyard of an office, or simply left behind in the kitchen fridge, each ingredient arrived through encounter and conversation. These are often unnoticed or out of place in dominant food systems. We experiment with these ingredients through cooking, tasting, and conversation, tracing how they open into wider relations of place, memory, and movement. These plants and animals, and substances form an unofficial inheritance, carrying relations, memories, disappearances, and the cultural logics that decide what is edible, valuable, or ignored. Each travels from soil to body, from one place to another, from life to death and back again.

Alongside these, we also carried migratory ingredients across borders. With Maurice, I cooked and experimented, tracing how they connect to our own Tastescape — a landscape shaped not by recipes. “Instead of fusion food, I think about friction food — dishes that don’t aim to harmonize but to expose the tensions between what is inherited, what is found, and what is carried across borders.”

At the public sharing dinner, one of the audience members said, “It is such an experience of an anarchic structure of taste.” I tasted her words afterwards and realized that, perhaps, a memory had been planted through tasting.

Thank you to Rachel Tee for the invitation to the MARC residency, to Kajsa for driving us, guiding us through the forest, and connecting us so generously with people, and to Maurice for accompanying me in this simple and almost dangerous experiment.

Artistic Collaborator: Maurice Lai

Supported by MARC residency / Le Kwatt production