Kochgeschichten / Cooking Stories

Community cooking workshops / Zine / Berlin, 2025

Kochgeschichten (German for "Cooking Stories") is a series of community cooking workshops with children in Berlin, culminating in a collaboratively produced riso-printed zine. The project uses cooking — the shared act of preparing, tasting, and telling stories around food — as a space for cultural exchange, knowledge-sharing, and collective care.

Over several sessions, participants gathered in a kitchen of Neu Nachbarschaft Moabit to cook dishes from memory: recipes carried across borders, adapted to new ingredients, infused with the tastes of home. Each workshop became a site of embodied transmission —  hands kneading dough, adjusting salt, tasting and remembering — where culinary knowledge passed between generations, geographies, and languages.

The recipes collected range from borscht and varenyky to sushi. Each is accompanied by a personal narrative: a grandmother's voice, the scent of a specific herb, the first meal cooked in a new country. The project documents not only ingredients and techniques but the emotional landscapes that food carries — memory, loss, resilience, and the slow work of making home elsewhere.

The zine was produced collaboratively over the course of the workshops, with participants contributing handwritten recipes, drawings, photographs, and texts. It is riso-printed in two colours (yellow and crimson) in a small edition, reflecting the project's commitment to accessible, low-cost, and cooperative publishing practices.

Project Director: Nika Grigorian 
Co-Director: Hannah Aldinger 
Art Education: Susana Vásquez Torres, Nika Grigorian, Hannah Aldinger, Ximena Ferrer Pizarro, Tom Summerfield, Ivana Papić
Photo/Video: Tom Summerfield 
Format: Risograph print, 148 × 105 mm
Edition: 50
Year: 2025