London, UK
Spiritual Flavours interweaves biographical narratives and spiritual accounts from Betty, Aziz and Ossie (who belong to a Catholic church, a mosque and a liberal synagogue, respectively) with the experiences of cooking in their homes in Ealing, London. The recipes thread narratives of past, present and future aspirations, spirituality and the everyday. Their commonalities and differences are expressed through visual and sonic synchronies and asynchronies. Also, by overlapping soundscapes of cooking and praying, the film develops a rhythmic and affective experience of the relationship between food and religious practices. At the end, Betty, Aziz and Ossie meet, cook and eat together.
"This film is part of my interdisciplinary doctoral research "Spiritual Flavours: Reflections on using creative practice to explore food and religion in a multi-faith suburb" (2022). This investigates the relationship between food and religious material practices of several faith communities in Ealing, a suburb in West London, selected to represent different faith and migration traditions. These include a Synagogue, a Sri Lankan Hindu Temple, a mosque, a Sikh Gurdwara, an Anglican church, a Roman Catholic church and an ethnically diverse Pentecostal church. The research developed an arts project, Spiritual Flavours, which comprises a photographic series, a film (5' and 28'), and an artist cookbook. Whilst the photographic series uses a formal approach, devoid of people, to explore the spatial arrangements of commensality within religious buildings, the cookbook and the film focus on participatory engagement and biographical narratives. These bring together a diverse range of intimate experiences of food and spirituality across both domestic and worship spaces, and expose the nuanced ways in which faith, age, gender, identity, migration, community and home intersect. The film also produces a rhythmic and multi-sensory experience through the use of the split-screen technique and the creative mixing of sounds of cooking and prayer." More information available at www.spiritualflavours.com.