Kalla’s cooking tips
Stop motion animation bringing one dialysis patient’s cooking tips to life.
With Luise Vormittag, Eva Afifah Rd and Daniela Barbeira. In collaboration with Central Saint Martins and Vital Arts. Produced at Tate Exchange, Tate Modern, February 2017.
Patients on dialysis have a very restricted diet, making flavourful meals difficult to prepare. Those from ethnic minority backgrounds are at greater risk of developing kidney failure, but culturally diverse cookbooks with recipes for renal patients are few and far between.
Vital Arts, alongside Central Saint Martins, set out to fill this gap. The wider project opens spaces for renal patients to share their diverse culinary knowledge with their community. This animation promotes patient engagement with the project and awareness of the subsequent collective cookbook.
Decisions about the creative direction for came afteran interview with Kalla, a dialysis patient from Sri Lanka. The visuals needed to match her friendly open voice, so we agreed cheerful hand-crafted paper models were the right choice.
Stop motion production took place over a weekend at Tate Exchange. While we worked, we used the space to also display recipe cards created by the Royal London Hospital patient community, and provided a friendly environment to exchange tips and ideas on flavoursome meals within the limitations of a renal diet.