Julija Mockutė

I have more than 7 years of experience working in professional kitchens, with a focus on vegan and vegetarian cuisines. At Fenix, a museum on migration, I am working on developing a kitchen program that focuses on bringing people together through cooking and eating together.

Here are some cooking projects I have worked on in the past.

Home-made Dinner 2 at Paviljoen aan het Water

6 July 2024

This interactive dining experience was centered around the theme of home-making. It was hosted together with Parel Strik, an artist working with encounters, and Vlada Predelina, artist looking into tacit knowledge systems of women in relation to land and colonial expansion through making, growing or gathering around food and the kitchen table.

All three hosts live in the neighborhood of the location, which is far from the homes they grew up in and spend much of their time creating new ones. They invited guests to reflect on what home means and how we create one in times of uncertainty. Each course involved small interactions, encouraging the guest to engage in home-making with ingredients that remind Julija, Parel, and Vlada of their homes.

Menu

Starter: Šaltibarščiai (cold borscht), a refreshing pink summer soup, served with hot new potatoes.

Main: Salad Olivier, featuring a spread of various help-yourself ingredients that come from the neighborhood.

Dessert: Baked sweet bread, shaped by the guests. The sweet breads were accompanied by tea made from fresh herbs sourced from the Afrikaandermarkt.

Home-made Dinner at Grey Space in the Middle

12 March 2023

For this Dinner Session, artist Parel Strik invited Julija Mockutė to create a dinner together with a focus on ‘home’, asking; What is creating a home? What is being at home? What does a home feel like? Both Parel and Julija live away from their old home, so much of their time is spent making and creating a new one. For this dinner, they invited the guests to ponder on what home is and how we create one in precarity. For this Dinner Session, the hosts brought ingredients that make them feel at home and invite the guest to take something home with them. Inspired by Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction”, which proposes that gathering is how we can create a sense of belonging, Parel and Julija came to Grey Space in the Middle’s kitchen to prepare a two-course meal based on heritage and seasonality, including a starter activity, which turned into a take-home dessert to bring home inside of a gifted embroidered towel.

Menu

Main: Potato gratin on a bed of spinach, roasted mini cauliflower steaks with a cauliflower puree with tahini, pomegranate, sliced almonds, lemon zest, and mint

Dessert: Sweet bread with herb butter

Lunch Club

When working at Kunstinstituut Melly, once a week I made packed lunch that could be ordered by my colleagues. The lunches were healthy, vegetarian, and vary depending on season.