From cooking to commoning: The making of intangible cultural heritage in OneLoveKitchen, Athens

This chapter is a critical discussion of intangible cultural heritage (ICH) and its conceptual predicates through the lens of a self-organised, collective, culinary project: OneLoveKitchen, an African collective kitchen in Athens, founded and sustained by a group of undocumented migrants and refugees from Africa along with Greek and foreign activists. It examines the emergence of a very distinctive kind of translocal cultural heritage through the sharing of cooking practices, skills and knowledge, and discusses how sharing was conflated with the crossing and contesting of borders. OneLoveKitchen demonstrates how cultural values can be co-created by agents of diverse national, socio-cultural, economic, political and religious backgrounds, who have embarked upon a common project motivated by a desire to care for each other in a safe, communal space shared and owned by all. The obvious challenge here is how to re-define ICH by taking into account transcultural, transnational and nomadic contexts of cultural production. What are the cultural values shared within a newly constituted community of former strangers with different personal histories, geographies and everyday experiences? How can these differences be negotiated to create – and enrich – a shared common space of care and active citizenship?