“We Feed Those Who Came Before Us”:
A Workshop by Rabiga Marx
Saturday, 25 April, 4-6pm
This workshop-ritual approaches food as an act of caring and as a form of a living archive. Structured as a collective action, a shared tea gathering with baursaks (traditional Kazakh bread), participants assemble a symbolic archive of recipes, understood not as instructions but as carriers of history, loss, transformation, and displacement. Through storytelling, taste, smell, and remembrance, we address our ancestors and acknowledge their presence within everyday practices. The ritual foregrounds intergenerational transmission and explores how embodied memory preserves what remains absent from institutional archives. The act of sharing baursaks and stories becomes a form of collective remembrance and a ritual of honoring those who came before us.
For this workshop, we will sit together around a table and share tea with baursaks. The bread will be offered as a gesture of hospitality as an act of welcoming and care. If participants like, they can also bring something with them: e.g. a recipe, or an object connected to their family history.
The workshop will be a collective action – we will sit together, share stories, remember recipes, and speak about food as an act of caring and as a living archive. We will reflect on how recipes change over time, and how missing or replaced ingredients can tell stories about migration, loss, or scarcity.
We will talk about how food carries history and memory, and how certain recipes changed in Kazakh and Kyrgyz nomadic culture during the Soviet period. For example, how cooking practices shifted and how these changes reflected larger political and social transformations.
Rabiga Marx is a curator and researcher working at the intersection of memory, trauma, and cultural practices in post-Soviet and postcolonial contexts. With a background in visual culture and roots in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, she explores how memory is preserved or fragmented across generations, particularly under regimes that have disrupted cultural continuity. She works through a decolonial lens, questioning the lasting cultural and intellectual frameworks inherited from empire.
Her curatorial practice focuses on embodied memory, ritual, and alternative forms of archiving. Through exhibitions, interviews, and collaborative research, she investigates how histories are carried through bodies, gestures, domestic spaces, and oral storytelling. She is particularly attentive to the nuances of sisterhood and communal experiences, examining how solidarity, care, and shared vulnerability shape collective memory and cultural resilience.
Marx approaches curation as a practice of care and dialogue, creating spaces where overlooked, silenced, or marginalized narratives can surface, resonate, and be reimagined.
This community gathering workshop takes place as part of the project “Caring Histories: Asian Caregivers in Berlin – Migration, Memory, and Social Change (1950–present)) at Mental Health Arts Space from March to December 2026.