infused lines, 2025,
participatory performance
photo credit: Aman Askarizad
The second part consists of a series of arrangements in which I’ve sought to find a way for the bitters to open up to the world. How do we make our sensory experience a gateway to talk about our feelings? This thinking process coincided with my internship at Snellu Café. I don't see the point in doing things on my own. I am deeply interested in how we exercise faculties like will, agency, and power when we are together, and I sense that exploring these through exercises provides a foundation for imagining futures and co-living. My will sparked this participatory performance process, but the agency of those at Snellu Café made it possible. I came up with a structure based on what I could observe, be part of, feel, and understand during my internship at Snellu Café. I imagined their participation as creative involvement. Thus, I invited my colleagues. Within the constraints of time, space, work shifts, and language, we tried to create something together. The name Kitchen Testimonies comes into play at this point.
Lastly, this structure is shaped in response to lived experience. Participants, subject matter, materials, and performance intersected naturally within life’s own dynamics. The conditions of these intersections—where an artist can be present and whom they can engage with—are open to discussion. Expressing all this is important to me because understanding the aesthetics behind what you encounter here is essential for multiplying value and opening it up for debate.
—doğa çal
The intention of Kitchen Testimonies was to define an area bigger than me that held space for experiments and various ways of participation. Each reconfiguration under the name Kitchen Testimonies consists of various people, wills, agencies, and power relations. In this particular work “Infused Lines,” I envisioned my colleagues as creative participants in two distinct phases. The first was making single-sip cups for the bitters, allowing us to experience bottled bitters’ flavors in an intense, concentrated way. For the production of glasses, we collaborated with ceramic artist Mimi McPartlan, who shared her collection of small cups and created a space for us to play with and shape clay. The second was preparing bitters through a set of poetic recipes in collaboration. The poetic recipes did not specify exact measurements for mixing the bitters. Instead, each server became aware of the flavors and combined them intuitively in response to the expressions, poems, and narratives presented on the menus. For example, if you asked me to prepare everything about ants bitters, my interpretation would consist solely of a rose aroma—which doesn’t even taste bitter but like pure flower. Within a limited time, we familiarized ourselves with each flavor, discussed which tastes aligned with which recipes, and ultimately, each participant developed their own flavor profile through mutual inspiration.
And I kept pottering around, unsure of what I wanted to do with them. I searched for ways to play with them. In the meantime, I started attending a series of self-compassion practices by Demirkan, who has been practicing Buddhism for 20 years. I understand that pain is something different from suffering, but I have not yet figured out how they are distinguished in my body. The bitter feelings located somewhere in my body, the bitterness caused by just witnessing the world, by my anxiety, the systemic pain, the bitterness I felt because of my privileges, the pain I felt for my lack of privileges, the bitter I couldn’t soothe, the bitter I could, the pain of a surgery, the bitterness of a broken heart—in Turkish, acı encompasses both the meanings of pain and bitter. Therefore, the terms pain, bitter, and bitterness all refer to the same concept here. And on and on. It belongs to me, but not only to me. Pain that I felt just as much as any other sentient being in the world. Can "Whose pain is greater?" be a real question? If your pain doesn't subside, can I soothe mine and run to you? How can I transform empathy into compassion? Through playing with the bitters, I began to identify various categories for them—the pains of daily life as we experience them here and now are addressed by bitters in situation. The great bitters reflect pains found in tragedies and literature. Bitters for meditation invites you into a self-compassion meditation practice by Demirkan, which I touched with bitters incorporating the tasting of it. As someone still new to meditation, I haven't thoroughly tested the effect of transforming this practice in this way. So, with the certainty of uncertainty, I invite you to explore it together.
This work is the outcome of two parallel processes. The first is the idea of Bitters. It came to me after realizing how difficult it was for me to sit with bitter feelings. I saw the process of plant extracts steeping in alcohol, releasing their bitterness along with their aroma, as a metaphor for my bitter feelings. Could this be a good place for me to start talking about bitter feelings? I had no idea how to prepare these bitter flavors, just as I didn't know how to differentiate between various kinds of emotional pain. I embraced this. I searched for the nearest point from which I could approach this ancient practice. I looked up recipes from food websites I followed. I found the book Botany at the Bar by Selena Ahmed, Ashley DuVal, and Rachel Meyer. Some of my bitters follow the exact recipes from this book. Some plants I couldn’t find in either Helsinki or Izmir, so I made incomplete bitters. Some herbs intrigued me on their own, and I boldly infused them in vodka without a recipe. Some extracts became real bitters, some of them were quite fresh and flourishing—a wide range of taste profiles I reached out to.
