Our curatorial research fellow, Yohannes Mulat Mekonnen, invites you to eat the museum, a postcolonial kitchen on September 11, 2025, at 17:00 at the Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum (RJM) in Cologne, as part of his ongoing archival research project.
This is an invitation not only to eat at the museum, but to eat the museum itself : a postcolonial kitchen proposed as a curatorial gesture, a method for working through the ethnographic collection.
One of the greatest challenges in engaging meaningfully with ethnographic collections today is excess. The overwhelming abundance of heritage can produce what Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung describes as a “choke” , an experience of epistemological indigestion.
In this dinner, Mekonnen takes that choke seriously, not just as a theoretical condition. In a circular, dialectical gesture, he aims to re-materialize this condition by introducing cooking and eating as embodied methods for working through institutional indigestion.
Through a carefully designed three-course menu, drawn directly from the museum’s collection, you are invited to taste the archive. This act of collective ingestion shifts heritage from frozen to fermented, from possession to process. Together, we refuse stasis.
Come hungry.
By invitation only. This project is generously funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation.
Für: Alle
Veranstalter: Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum
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