Necromantic Kitchen (2025)

Tenthaus

The Necromantic Kitchen is developed by artist duo Annike Flo + Lexie Owen and consists of an installation hosting a series of meals and workshops with ingredients grown and harvested from Oslo’s graveyards. Both the installation and workshop are the first public contact points for the duo’s shared research into meeting points between material death cultures, biological processes of decomposition, and magic. Prompted by a frustration with perceived limitations in Norwegian norms around the internment of the dead and the process of grieving, through the project the duo seek to reclaim the notion of necromancy, seeing in it the traces of pre-christian burial and grieving practices, and the potential for new forms of grieving that embrace ongoingness - both in grief and grieving, and in the recirculation of the energetic potential of our bodies into soil. 

Though their research into topics of death, dying and recirculation are broad, touching scales from personal and intimate to socio-cultural to the planetary, this meeting point for the project focuses on death and the domestic. Thinking back to a time when death and dying were domestic processes, when death was always a guest in our houses, the installation and performative workshop connects the metabolic action of decomposition with human digestion and everyday kitchen magic—fermentation, and other transformative food processes such as butter churning.