'Mandeville Reading' during the Kitchen139 -Ten-day Communal Kitchen Experiment- A cooperation between W139 and Casco, in the context of 'The Grand Domestic Revolution – User’s Manual'. |
 Mandeville Reading at Kitchen139: A Ten-day Communal Kitchen Experiment A cooperation between W139 and Casco, in the context of The Grand Domestic Revolution – User’s Manual, Jan van Eyck Academie & KijkRuimte, 2012  Kitchen139' transforms W139 into a ten-day open kitchen and invites all of those occupied with multiple deadlines and appointments towards the end of year, to join a collective house management where cooking, eating, talking, thinking, cleaning are all coming together. Inspiring or even more fatiguing, or possibly both? Each dinner will be prepared by a diversity of social and cultural initiatives, including Artists in Occupy Amsterdam, Amsterdam Dinner Movement and The Living Room(s), that will express their current works through the hospitality of cooking and serving. Each cooking process will be moderated by a host and broadcasted daily from 19.00-20.30 HRS on Red Light Radio for which listeners can not only learn of the original recipes but also the materials of thoughts behind them. Parallel to the cooking sessions will be a series of daily lectures by Amsterdam based economist Claus Peter Pfeffer on his alternative economic theory 'Plutopia - Policies for Globally Sustainable Common Wealth', aka Pfeifferism. |
Kitchen139' has been co-developed by W139 and Casco in the context of the current project exhibition at Casco 'The Grand Domestic Revolution 'User's Manual' (GDR). In GDR exhibition, on view through 26 February 2012, the private status of domestic space is questioned and new forms of life in common are searched for. 'Kitchen139' is conceived out of an observation of what one may call a resurgence of interest in domesticity and social change embodied by movements such as Occupy Amsterdam, who are making common domestic matters public on the Beursplein. Only 200 metres away, Kitchen139 could be considered as a differentiated, extended tent of Occupy Amsterdam and a voice in the continuous call for a grand domestic revolution today. Next to our evening program, the space will be open for daily public use. Reading Mandeville The Fable of The Bees: or, Private Vices, Public Benefits is a book by Bernard Mandeville, consisting of the poem The Grumbling Hive: or, Knaves turn’d Honest and prose discussion of it. The poem was published in 1705 and the book first appeared in 1714. The poem elucidates many key principles of economic thought, including division of labor and the invisible hand, seventy years before Adam Smith (indeed, John Maynard Keynes argues Smith was probably referencing Mandeville. It also describes the paradox of thrift centuries before Keynes, and may be seen as part of the school of underconsumption. At the time, however, it was considered scandalous. Keynes reports in his General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, that it was "convicted as a nuisance by the grand jury of Middlesex in 1723, which stands out in the history of the moral sciences for its scandalous reputation. Only one man is recorded as having spoken a good word for it, namely Dr. Johnson, who declared that it did not puzzle him, but 'opened his eyes into real life very much'." |
The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Public Benefits consisted of a poem, The Grumbling Hive, or Knaves Turn'd Honest, along with an extensive prose commentary. The poem had appeared in 1705 and was intended as a commentary on England as Mandeville saw it. |
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