Cooking in Maximum Security is a research project developed on the cusp of art and social anthropology and designed to be implemented in different prisons throughout the world. CMS bases its potential on a social and human reading of “cooking methods” that inmates generate with the minimal resources existing in their environment. It was conceived in 2009 with a group of inmates of an Italian maximum security penitentiery and developed with prisoners of differents penal institutions, focusing on the culinary methods that apply the limited available resources found within prison cells. Phase 1 was developed in Italy while phase 2 is currently being developed in Spain.
The passion many prisoners nurture for cooking is also a tool for redemption and the formation of a new identity. Men from patriarchal socio-cultural contexts –where gender differences are strongly demarcated through a clear division of tasks–, men who had never set foot in a kitchen before, now find themselves inventing culinary spaces, methods and tools. Kitchen practices reposition the “traditional” male figure through a transformation of the role and values both within the family and the penal world, where certain categories connected to gender usually tend to exacerbate themselves. Cooking and sharing a meal (often the cook invites other inmates into his cell) become acts of personal construction and development, involving many different aspects of the human being: psychological, social, cultural, emotional and identity-related. Cooking in prison becomes a means to find dignity and a social space among the prison community and, inevitably, also triggers a repositioning within the family of origin. It is precisely from the family, particularly the female memebers, that support is requested, be it in terms of raw materials, money to buy certain food and tools, or recipes and information concerning the preparation of traditional family dishes. The project originated with the intention to create a book: a manual where kitchen utensils -described and illustrated in detail- are the connecting thread with a special emphasis on their construction and uses. |
