Fermenting relationships - A conversation with Christina Kotsilelou

Welcome to the Onassis AiR Conversations. My name is Myrto Katsimicha. I am a curator and cultural worker based in Athens and your host in this series of recorded encounters with the participants of Onassis AiR. Founded on the principles of learning and doing with others, Onassis AiR is an international research residency program in Athens initiated by the Onassis Foundation in 2019. They say that what happens in one place stays in that place. I cannot find a better way to describe all the things that have been happening inside the Onassis AiR house since I first entered as a participant of the Critical Practices Program in Fall 2019. The truth is, it is not easy to transmit an open-ended process of relationing, which is very personal and relevant to a specific place and moment in time. How can I then give you a glimpse into that process? Everything starts with a conversation. Throughout this series, I'll be speaking with the Onassis AiR participants to shed light on their artistic practices and needs, as well as to reflect on ways of being and working together.

In this conversation, I'll be speaking with Christina Kotsilelou, a product designer and chef based in Athens. Through her practice Christina has been experimenting and creatively combining design and cooking in various ways. Food has been an integral part of the Onassis AiR program since day one. As part of The School of Infinite Rehearsals, we kicked-off a chef-in-residence program in order to pair artistic and culinary practices and explore collectively sustainable cooking practices, kitchen waste management, biodiversity and methods of preservation and fermentation. Christina participated in The School of Infinite Rehearsals Movement III, that focused on the notion of ecologies. Drawing from her experience and practice, we will discuss together issues concerning food production and distribution, sustainability and environmental ethics. Christina, welcome to Pali-Room!

Hi Myrto, nice to see you again!

Nice to have you here. I would like to start our conversation today with some background information. You've studied art and design in London and since 2006 you've been running, together with your partner Thanos Karampatsos, Greece is for Lovers, a product design studio specializing in exploring cultural identity through objects and especially the Greek cultural identity and the ways this has been perceived through certain icons or symbols. It seems to me that the issue of representation is an important aspect of your culinary practice as well, which you try to address and question through the use of humor and irony and I'm very curious to know, how do you see this connection between these two different creative fields that you're working in?

I think humor and irony are issues that we deal more with Greece is for Lovers. It's more present in the work there in the way that we play with stereotypes, with humor and with sort of stuff that are considered shameful and we try to make them more accepted, let's say. We also play with kitsch and camp and this is not so much present in the culinary part of my work. The fact that I started working with food was also another creative expression for me. The similarity I sort of see with the work that I do with product design is how I try to sort of elevate simple ingredients. Because I'm cooking vegetarian most of the time or vegan, I try to play and to elevate simple ingredients into more luxurious tastes. I'm also very interested in the way food is presented. Another thing which I find interesting and has nothing to do with what you said, but I think it's an interesting point, like the connection between the two fields, I think for me, cooking was sort of like a balance, trying to find a balance to deal with the guilt, the guilt of designing new products in a world that doesn't need anymore, really. On the other hand, food is something that is consumed and it disappears. It leaves no trace. So, for me, this is a kind of balance between the two fields. I don't know if it makes sense.

Yeah, that's very interesting. I would never have thought about the notion of guilt in your practice. I was thinking about representation in terms of how much focus you also place in the presentation of food. I remember when we were in Aigina and you did your presentation about your practice and the props that you used to present the dessert.

Yeah, this was a very funny project indeed and this was also part of the work of 'Greece is for Lovers', but playing with food again. You tried this halva dessert and it was made in molds of body parts of ancient Greek statues. So, you had like bums and boobs and all the parts.

That was really funny. Would you like to elaborate a bit on what was the turning point for you?You studied art and design. How did you end up splitting your time between cooking and product design?

After a few years with 'Greece is for Lovers' and working with Thanos, at some point I decided I want to look into cooking a little bit more. I always loved cooking. So, I attended this cooking school in Los Angeles, which was concentrating more on vegan and raw vegan food and after that I stayed there for three months, I came back and I started working with food more. I was treating it more like projects again, where in the beginning, you have a brief, you have a beginning and at some point you have the end of the project. So, I was never really working full-time in restaurants. I tried it and it doesn't work with me. I think it's too much. It's very stressful and also, I think, at some point I would be bored of food. I see a lot of that happening with people who really love food, like chefs who love cooking and after a point it becomes so mundane, the same thing over and over again and I don't want to have that. So, I prefer to do it more like in pop-ups or working with different projects every time, in different places, with different people, so that it doesn't get boring.

As I've mentioned in our introduction, the chef-in-residence program is a fairly recent addition to our program and you are one of the very first chefs-in-residentce of The School of Infinite Rehearsals that took part in a collective research on ecologies. As we became more and more aware of environmental crises, there is a growing critical discourse that concerns the production and distribution of food. How do you engage with these issues through your practice?

I think food and nutrition are directly linked to ecologies and when I say eating as a political act, it's about knowing where your food comes from and also knowing and understanding your place in the food system. Is it ethically sourced or is it ethically produced? Is it sustainable? Is it good for the planet? Also, there are questions coming in about processed and chemically-produced food. Is this food alive and since we're alive and we're on an alive planet when we eat this dead food, is it good for us? So, one part is that and the other part I was really interested in is waste management in the kitchen. It starts from the households, but it goes to the restaurant business as well. So, how do we manage waste and how do we eliminate waste? Up to a point, we had recycling as an answer, but now it's not about that. It's more about reducing waste completely. And then also, the issues of sustainability and biodiversity in the ingredients. How can we use more local ingredients? This is most of the stuff I was thinking when I was invited to do this residency.

The School of Infinite Rehearsals is a collective research program that brings together an interdisciplinary group of practitioners to work around a common theme and in your case that was ecologies. I know that you have been collaborating with your partner Thanos for many, many years, but I'm not sure if you've ever worked with such a mix of people like the group of Movement III. So, I was wondering, what was your specific research angle when you entered, especially since it was such an open and new program, and how do you see your culinary practice merging with the collective one that you developed as a group?

Yeah, for me, working with so many people was a totally new experience. I'm used to working either on my own or with one other person. One of the areas I wanted to explore during my time at Onassis AiR was processes of preserving and fermenting food. So, the pickle workshop that we did together and also the vegan cheese-making and tasting that we tried was also part of this. Fermentation is one of the oldest ways of preserving food and it was the most pre-industrial food we know, let's say. It's a way of transforming food into more digestible and gut friendly, a superfood. In the end, it's kind of an antidote to processed-food as well, if you think about it. So, I was very much into this whole idea of preserving and also transforming food into something digestible, gut friendly and also delicious, because most of this food tastes really really good.

I remember that we tried fermenting avocado, raspberries...

Blueberries.

Blueberries, sorry. What else?

I think we had cauliflower, beetroot, some mix of stuff. I mean, we still have stuff downstairs. We have to still try and the more you let them, the more you let them ferment, the better they get.

But what are the basic steps? Would you like to explain the basic ingredients? Because it was really simple in the end to do it. Anyone can do it.

There are different kinds of fermentation. There's the one we tried which was fermenting in a sort of brine with water, vinegar, sugar and salt. There's like a balance between these, but it's fermenting in a brine. Then you have fermentation just with salt, where you do it with vegetables that are more watery, like for example the cabbage. You can ferment it just with putting salt and then placing a weight on top and then you draw out the juices and it ferments in these juices. So, there are lots of different kinds of fermentation. The one we tried I prefer it the most because, it's always a mix of like sweet and sour and the vegetables or the food that you ferment remain crunchy. So, I think it's a really nice way of doing it.

It was a nice experience and also the fact that we named the different recipes. During the six weeks at some point you collectively came together and you decided to focus your research on the element of water. I would like to ask, how did you come to this decision and what was the property of water that resonated with you the most?

I'm trying to think about the origins of our idea. I think it began with your workshop, the workshop that we did with you, which was a workshop about how to work together, how to be together as a group. From that workshop, I think we sort of came to a conclusion that we wanted to do something about care and processes of care and then we talked about, for example, serving each other a glass of water every day as, you know, as a care.

Ritual.

Ritual, yeah, exactly! And then water kept coming up in all the conversations we had and all the references we had in books and stuff. So, at some point we decided that we should maybe do something about water. Then we started listing the properties of water, as you said, and for me, there were two things that kind of struck me. One was transformation, which is -in terms of cooking- the word that describes everything in the sense that you take raw ingredients, you manipulate them somehow and then you have an edible result. So, this is like a transformation process. And then the other word that I was very much interested in was symbiosis, which links very well with all the stuff that we talked about before about the fermentation. Because in fermentation you create a symbiotic environment, a symbiosis of microorganisms which work together in fermenting the food. A good example for this would be something that I'm writing about in the publication that we're doing. It's a drink called Kombucha, which is a fermented drink that originated in China and from then on it spread. Now it's kind of the new hippie drink. I think they try to make it a little bit less hippie, but it's always in this category. But actually it's a really nice drink. It's kind of like a sour, a kind of like fizzy drink, that you make using a starter. As you do for example with kefir. You have a starter or "the mother", as you call it, and the starter in the case of Kombucha is called scoby, which actually means symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast. So, it's like a symbiotic relationship of different bacteria, which under the right circumstances produce this drink, which is very good for the gut. I think symbiosis was very much connected to this part of fermentation and also, I was really interested in the fact that in this kind of fermenting relationships, there's a very fine line between rot and fermentation.

Where is this fine line?

In the sense that you have to kind of control the conditions. The environment has to be a certain temperature. It shouldn't be very hot. It shouldn't be very cold. Also, you have to feed your scoby or this "mother", which is kind of like a jelly alien looking thing. So, you intervene, you provide the conditions for it to grow.

In a way, it's like you're caring for it.

Exactly! So, care comes in again. But also this this fine line of rot and fermentation, if you think about it, it is kind of like human relationships as well, where there's always a fine line between toxicity and flourishment. This was very interesting for me.

Well, thank you. I didn't know about this drink and I'm looking forward to taste it at some point.

Yeah, I have to bring one. I was supposed to bring one here to have it as a pet, but it will happen.

Well, in order to further develop your research, you embarked all together on a trip and you went to Prespes lake, which is in the north of Greece and after you came back, I remember, we were discussing a lot about your findings, which concerned the geopolitics of Prespes and the dangers that the biotope is facing right now that are related to the climate change. I would be interested to know your findings in relation to food.

Prespes was an amazing place and I think it was a great choice for us because we talked about different places and like pros and cons of every different place, which all of them were places near water or it was either a lake or sea or somewhere near a river. But we chose Prespes because we thought it was -and it actually is- a whole ecosystem around the lakes which is protected.

Was it the first time that you went there?

For me yeah and it was amazing apart from the environment itself. It wasn't the right season, I think, because it was a bit gray. I was expecting more green around, but it was more gray and very cold. But also the great thing about Prespes was the community of people working or living there, which was a mix of either people who were born there and they left for studying and then they came back or it was people who chose to live there because of work. Speaking with these people was the most interesting thing and regarding food as well. I expected that I would find more edible stuff around the lake or in the woods, but it was the wrong season. There wasn't much. We found these little yellow flowers called Primula, which are edible, but apart from that, not much. But we met this amazing mushroom guy, Nikos, who talked to us a lot about the mushrooms and the truffles, because he is truffle hunting as well with a dog. He does this for a living. He provides restaurants with truffles and mushrooms. And he also took us around the woods where we found a little bit of truffle.

A tiny bit.

A tiny bit of truffle, which was not edible, but it was great to see how he does it. He also talked to me about something that later I discovered that we had seen. Apparently in the lake there's this kind of "lakeweed", because you can't say seaweed. There's this edible "lakeweed", which they call the lake chestnut and it's edible. We couldn't find it in the lake, but on one of the beaches that we visited, it was full of this. It was kind of like wooden, again very alien looking, wooden sort of like dried flowers and we didn't know what it was. Then we came back and Sam found out that actually this was the lake chestnut.

Interesting.

Yeah, and then we talked with a lot of people about the local crops, which is mainly beans. They're very famous, the giant beans of Prespes.

That's why you brought back huge bags of beans.

And they have this black giant beans there, which are amazing because they taste a bit like chestnuts again. When you bake them they're more sweet than the white ones. So, we talked about food a lot. I didn't find a lot of stuff, but it was interesting in other ways.

I see.

We also did a pie workshop, which was nice, with a local. He was a chef, who was a friend of the guy that rent us the place where we stayed. He did a small pie workshop where we made spinach pies and we cooked them in an open fire. This was great.

I'm smelling the taste.

It was amazing and a lot of tsipouro involved in the situation.

I wonder why. All right, so during these six weeks, apart from the trip, apart from all the collective stuff that you did together, reflecting back, how do you think the practices of the five other people that were in the group feed in your practice?

I think the interesting part for me for this whole six weeks was how we sort of created a bubble. It was like putting six different personalities and practices under one roof. We were kind of in this bubble, which was during the pandemic, by the way, which we never really addressed in the work, but it was there. You could feel it a lot when you went back home. Not only the pandemic, but everything else, you know, going on in Greece or the whole world. So, we created this safe space, which involved a lot of care, as we talked about and we were able to talk about our practices and find ways of coexisting and doing research together. I mean, of course, I got a lot from this. I can't pinpoint exactly what I got from each one, but I know that I'm leaving with so much references and so much new stuff that I want to look into further, like books and movies. And it was great also to meet all these different people, who I know that with most of them I'm going to keep in contact with. Also, talking about ecologies I think it kind of proved how when you talk about ecologies, you have to talk about nutrition or food or you have to talk about architecture or you have to talk about activism. It kind of proved this phrase that we had from James, "everything equally evolved", or everything connected. It was very much a proof of that, I think.

Also, the symbiosis that you were talking about before. I think that you're very right in the sense that you describe it as a bubble, especially under the conditions that we are living in at the moment. Of course, you had a totally different experience of the place and the space because of this situation. We felt that it was really important to be able to host a group of people and foster this kind of research even under these very special circumstances. We are about to close our discussion today and I would like to ask you one last question. I'm curious to know how all these questions that we brought up during our conversation today link back to Athens and its food community and I'm thinking, is there a turn that you have observed happening right now in Athens towards the ethics and the sustainability of food? How do you think this is expressed?

I would say I'm kind of torn, because on one hand you start to see small movements from chefs who try to use more local ingredients or farmers who try to grow more ingredients instead of importing everything. So, in that sense, there are some things happening. But on the other hand, it's like we sort of discovered new cuisines -there's a lot of Japanese places, there's a lot of Thai places- which is great. Of course, I love having different food around, but then this means that we import a lot of stuff. I'm not saying that we can only survive with what we have here, but at some point it gets ridiculous when we import a little lemon that will cost six euros and you can substitute it with something else. But also, I see a lot of new producers who make independent companies, who make really nice stuff and they take care of the packaging and the branding as well. So, it goes on a good direction, I would say. Unfortunately, what I don't see and I think it's really important within the restaurant industry is how they deal with waste. I don't think anyone does that. Maybe a few restaurants that try and make everything from scratch. They make their own bread, which eliminates waste, of course, as well as it makes it more sustainable. People are not educated enough on this field I think and this doesn't mean educated from school, but as chefs, as professionals working in professional kitchens, I think there should be more education on this part. And this is something I want to really look into. There's a seminar happening in the summer and in September in Copenhagen, which is exactly about this. It's organized by the people from Noma and it's about waste management and sustainability in the kitchen and I think this is my goal for going there soon.

I was afraid that you would say that about waste and we recently realized how much food was wasted during the pandemic from the producers themselves because they couldn't give them to restaurants or hotels or all this chain that is created between production and distribution could not calibrate the effects of the pandemic. This was really sad for me to realize.

If you see at the supermarkets as well, most of the food have this 'sell by date' or 'best before date' label, which is very soon. Most of the stuff you can still eat them like five days after and this means that they throw away a lot of stuff because not everything gets bought. So, you know, it's a whole system that needs changing. But I think the restaurant industry, which is a huge industry, especially in Greece, is very much behind in this topic.

Well, I'm glad you brought this up and I hope that we become more and more mindful of what we eat and what we throw. I want to thank you so much for the conversation and it was a real pleasure to taste your recipes and to experiment with the workshops that you did and I hope that you bring us some Kombucha to try.

I will, I will. I promise.

Thank you, Christina!

Thank you.

Thank you for listening. If you want to listen to more conversations, please subscribe to our channel. You can find more about the Onassis AiR residency program and each participant at www.onaassis.org. This series is produced by Onassis AiR. Thanks to Nikos Kollias, the sound designer of the series and to Nikos Lymperis for providing the original music intro theme.