The heart of every home

The project involved a team of international and local artists and started with the filming of 20 interviews of people of all ages seated around the kitchen table answering a set of standard questions about what the kitchen actually means to them. Kitchens involved were commercial, communal and domestic in nature to provide a wider variety more representative of Maltese and Gozitan society. 

“As project co-ordinator I put forward the idea and together with an international group we came up with ways to artistically bring to light the Maltese way of life using the kitchen space as point of reference,” Glen Calleja, who is the cultural contact point at the Office of the Prime Minister, says.

A secondary objective to the team was to produce a number of tangible cultural products in diverse media.

“You can tell a lot about a person from visiting their homes. Unfortunately we could only capture visual and audio impressions whilst filming then interviews, however with the book we were able to explore other senses like smells, taste and the general feel you get when you go into someone’s home.”

The project began by filming a series of 20 interviews where candidates answered questions about what the kitchen means to them, who the kitchen reminds them of and memorable stories that took place in the kitchen.

“French anthropologist Elise Billard and myself spent between one and two hours with every interviewee to get just one minute of good film. Whilst we were filming we also had local photographers Gilbert Calleja and Ruben Buhagiar taking still pictures, which we eventually used for the book and a photographic exhibition.

“We wanted to steer the project away from food as much as possible. You do so many other things in the kitchen, children do homework, families meet and talk about the ups and downs of their day, people fight and make up, all around the kitchen table. Unfortunately however the association with food was too strong for some of the interviewees with five or six of them even going as far as preparing us a meal. Food just too obvious an association for an artistic project.

“It is the little idiosyncrasies and what they mean to the people living in those kitchens that interested us. One of our first interviews was with an old lady who was wheelchair bound. The walls of her cluttered kitchen were adorned with holy pictures.

“She felt that the kitchen was her control room to the universe, where she could pray for the people in her life and God would intervene on her behalf. An old woman with little control over her own body had somehow managed to feel like she was in control.”

Calleja describes entering the intimacy of people’s homes as “challenging” but necessary for their research.

“When people get over the initial fear of the camera and begin to open up to you it is very rewarding. One young woman’s mother had passed away six months before our interview and talking about the her kitchen made her remember her mother with fondness, love and a tear or two.”

The interviews act as a dossier of ethnography and they are given an artistic twist. Besides the interviews the group has also launched a book showing photographs and featuring short semi-literary essays based on the stories that came out of the interviews. The interviews have also been reworked into plays transforming the interviews into theatre performances, directed by Italian actor and director Enrico Masseroli, which were held in March. 

“The kitchen inspires memories, for some more so than others. One couple had two jars filled with corks where every cork had its own story. A 1959 Chateau Lafite brings back memories of the night they cracked open the bottle. Another interesting aspect of the interviews turned out to be the input from family members who were hanging around the house. The background activity often provided peculiar insight into local family life.”

Reactions to the project have been encouraging. “We started out looking for people to interview from our immediate networks. Eventually however we started to get requests from people who were interested in being part of the project. It was interesting to see people dressed up to the nines because the camera crew were coming.:

Calleja talks about his one disappointment in the project, which was not being able to get an interview that took place in an unowned kitchen.

“I wanted to do an interview in a kitchen at a showroom, to find out how long it had been there, waiting for someone to come and bring it to life. I was also somewhat surprised. That sort of thing acts as free advertising so I expected kitchen suppliers to be excited about the project.”