Course Offering: Before Consent, There Was the Kitchen + The Hands of Gods: food, body, home and power.
facilitated by Jonah Batambuze
We’re excited to announce a two-session offering by Jonah Batambuze at the School of Instituting Otherwise. Jonah’s work sits at the intersection of everyday life, artistic practice, and careful attention to how authority and discipline are quietly learned. Rather than approaching power through abstraction or debate, his sessions begin with what is already familiar: domestic space, bodily habit, small acts repeated until they feel natural.
Across two sessions, Jonah invites participants to slow down their noticing—to attend to gestures, routines, and corrections that often escape formal analysis, and to explore how these ordinary moments shape how meaning, belonging, and constraint are carried forward.
Course 1
Before Consent, There Was the Kitchen
A 90-minute session on how power is learned at home
Most of us don’t first encounter power through politics or institutions.
We learn it at home — in kitchens and at dining tables.
This session explores how everyday food rituals quietly teach hierarchy: who cooks, who serves, who eats first, and which behaviours are corrected without explanation. Rather than focusing on food as culture or celebration, the session invites participants to reflect on their own embodied memories of care, correction, and proximity.
The session begins without theory or case studies. Instead, participants are guided to notice what their bodies already recognize about space, permission, and belonging. From there, the session introduces a set of conceptual lenses that help make these everyday experiences legible.
This is not a discussion about what should be done.
It is an invitation to notice how power becomes ordinary — and to carry that way of seeing into writing, art, research, or daily life.
No prior background required.
Course 2
The Hands of Gods
Gesture, Discipline, and Art as Inquiry
This session centers on a short film, The Hands of Gods, which examines how a small, everyday gesture — using the left hand — becomes a site of moral instruction, correction, and control across families and cultures.
Participants begin by watching the film in silence, before any explanation is offered. The session then moves through domestic stories and everyday moments where tradition enters the body, opening up a conversation about how repetition, correction, and intimacy shape behaviour over time.
Rather than treating art as illustration or self-expression, this session explores art as a method of inquiry — a way of noticing what formal archives often overlook. Through discussion, participants are invited to consider how lived experience, when treated carefully, can function as evidence.
This is not an artist talk, and it is not a session about belief or identity.
It is an exploration of how art can be used to stay with complexity rather than resolve it.
Open to writers, artists, researchers, and anyone curious about how meaning is shaped through the body.
Where: Online ( Zoom)
When:
Course 1: Before Consent, There Was the Kitchen
Saturday 7 March, 5:00–6:30 PM GMT / 10:30 PM- 12:00 AM IST
Course 2: The Hands of Gods
Saturday 14 March, 5:00–6:30 PM GMT / 10:30 PM - 12:00 AM IST
Apply here
About the Facilitator:
Jonah Batambuze is a Ugandan-American interdisciplinary artist, writer, and cultural strategist whose work explores how power is learned and reproduced through everyday life. Working across food, film, and lived archive, his practice traces how kitchens, tables, gesture, and correction shape hierarchy long before it is named as politics or law. He is the founder of the BlindianProject and a steward of South Asians for Black Lives, and his work has been presented across community, academic, and cultural spaces in the UK, US, Europe, and South Asia.
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