SUARANTAU
Recipes as Scores: Collective Composition through Food, Sound, and Storytelling
pic credit : Johns george
SUARANTAU is a participatory sound workshop series by Ariel Orah exploring how recipes can become musical scores, and how collective cooking can become a process of collective composition.
The title is a portmanteau from two Indonesian words: Suara (Sound) and Rantau (Migration). The project focuses on Socially Engaged (participatory) Sonic Art Creation, creating supportive environments for experimentation while pushing the boundaries of sound art through dialogue, collective participation, and shared experience.
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Drawing from Ariel Orah's practice in experimental music, participatory performance, and radio art, the workshop combines improvisation, sonic dramaturgy, graphic scoring, storytelling, and communal cooking into one collective compositional process.
Rather than treating recipes simply as instructions for preparing food, SUARANTAU approaches them as living scores. Like a musical score, a recipe can be interpreted, rewritten, translated, interrupted, expanded, or collectively negotiated. Participants contribute recipes, ingredients, sounds, and personal memories that gradually evolve into both a shared meal and a temporary sound composition.
Food functions simultaneously as an artistic medium, a research interface, and a social lubricant. Cooking becomes a way of negotiating relationships, while sound becomes another ingredient within the recipe itself.
Each workshop begins with a site, a story, or a local question. Together with participants, these stories are translated into a simple dramaturgical structure. Working in groups, participants compose visual scores by combining local narratives, personal memories, cooking actions, ingredients, and sound sources. The scores are then exchanged, interpreted by other groups, and activated through voices, found objects, instruments, field recordings, and improvisation.
Rather than treating recipes simply as instructions for preparing food, SUARANTAU approaches them as living scores. Like a musical score, a recipe can be interpreted, rewritten, translated, interrupted, expanded, or collectively negotiated. Participants contribute recipes, ingredients, sounds, and personal memories that gradually evolve into both a shared meal and a temporary sound composition.
Food functions simultaneously as an artistic medium, a research interface, and a social lubricant. Cooking becomes a way of negotiating relationships, while sound becomes another ingredient within the recipe itself.
Each workshop begins with a site, a story, or a local question. Together with participants, these stories are translated into a simple dramaturgical structure. Working in groups, participants compose visual scores by combining local narratives, personal memories, cooking actions, ingredients, and sound sources. The scores are then exchanged, interpreted by other groups, and activated through voices, found objects, instruments, field recordings, and improvisation.
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Rather than aiming for polished musical outcomes, the workshop values interpretation, collaboration, and collective listening. Every workshop concludes with a temporary live sound composition and a shared meal, allowing participants to experience composition not only as something to hear, but also as something to cook, negotiate, and eat together.
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Site-Specific EditionNovilla, Berlin (Disquiet: Time Emotion Studies)
The first expanded edition of this format was developed for Novilla in Berlin Schöneweide.
Responding to the layered history of the site—from the industrial ambitions of "Elektropolis," through war, displacement, the Cold War, and German reunification, to its present role as an artist-run cultural space facing renewed right-wing hostility—the workshop invited participants to compose with history rather than simply learn about it.
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The workshop unfolded through three collective chapters:
Electropolis — A Utopian Dream
Preparing Indonesian yellow rice while responding to ideas of industry, movement, migration, and technological optimism.
Transformation and Fragmentation
Preparing a communal hot pot while reflecting on displacement, changing ownership, war, and layered histories.
Coexistence and Futures
Preparing stir-fried vegetables while imagining new forms of gathering, care, and collective futures.
Each station combined cooking, storytelling, graphic score making, and improvisation. Participants collectively composed both a shared meal and an experimental sound performance, using recipes as scores and sound as another ingredient within the process.
Rather than treating food as a metaphor, the workshop understands cooking itself as a compositional practice: one in which memories, histories, ingredients, and people temporarily come together to produce new forms of listening and coexistence.
Electropolis — A Utopian Dream
Preparing Indonesian yellow rice while responding to ideas of industry, movement, migration, and technological optimism.
Transformation and Fragmentation
Preparing a communal hot pot while reflecting on displacement, changing ownership, war, and layered histories.
Coexistence and Futures
Preparing stir-fried vegetables while imagining new forms of gathering, care, and collective futures.
Each station combined cooking, storytelling, graphic score making, and improvisation. Participants collectively composed both a shared meal and an experimental sound performance, using recipes as scores and sound as another ingredient within the process.
Rather than treating food as a metaphor, the workshop understands cooking itself as a compositional practice: one in which memories, histories, ingredients, and people temporarily come together to produce new forms of listening and coexistence.
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