What Doesn’t Fit Into a Recipe: Memory, Gestures, and Stories Hidden in Food

What does Central European identity mean to you? Is it the taste of homemade soup, the smell of freshly baked bread, a family recipe, or a memory of the landscape? Or is it something harder to name, yet still carried within us?

The Central European School of Imagination workshop invites you to the shared table. It opens a space for collective reflection on what connects us in our region, shapes us, and where we drift apart.

We are interested in what remains shared even as society becomes increasingly divided. How can sharing experiences, stories, and symbols create space for greater closeness, understanding, and imagining the future?

We will begin with food as a carrier of memory, relationships, and everyday life. With recipes that hold more than just a procedure — family stories, regional traditions, and daily routines. With gestures, scents, and small rituals passed down without needing explanation.

What we will cook together, we will keep under wraps for now. But perhaps this will give you a hint…

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It may seem modest — like dough.

Yet inside, a landscape opens up: potatoes, curd cheese, cabbage, mushrooms, meat, and sweet fruit.

Each bite carries a different story.

They do not demand attention; quietly, but confidently, they invite you.

To sit at the table, to slow down, to converse as it flows between plates and memories.

They are food of the hands and of memory.

They are shaped without grand words.

They are passed on more through movement than through recipe — in how the dough is sealed, how the edge is pressed, how one knows when enough is enough.

In their folds, everyday life meets celebration, poverty meets ingenuity, home meets what is constantly changing.

Perhaps that is precisely why they represent more than just Polish cuisine.

They are an image of Central Europe: layered, shared, changeable — and yet intimately familiar.

All it takes is one bite.

And for a moment, to become part of something that has long been here —
and keeps being put together again.

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We will share, talk, and look for images, symbols, and associations we carry in relation to our environment and roots — sometimes consciously, sometimes only intuitively.

The workshop is open to everyone, regardless of experience or profession.

Accept the invitation to taste, and to be part of the shared table for a while.

@VisegradFund

Practical information
Date: 3rd June 2026 from 14 – 20h
Venue: Vila P651, Pevnostní 65/8, Praha 6
Bring: one traditional recipe or a memory connected to it that means something to you