The Writer’s Kitchen is based in the Rotterdam home of Renée Turner, Cesare Davolio, and Eliot Davolio. We invite artists, filmmakers, illustrators, animators, writers, and educators curious about expanding narrative forms to come develop ideas.
Guests are by invitation only. Residents stay for a week or two to give concentrated time to writing, illustrating, working on a script, collaborating with us or others, and generally letting narrative ideas simmer. In addition to offering a retreat for concentration, we occasionally host informal gatherings in our living room, conversations about works in progress and the richness of various narrative forms. Whether visual, verbal, or both, what drives The Writer’s Kitchen is how stories are evoked, made legible, and resonant.
The Writer’s Kitchen continues a tradition in our home of treating domestic space as a site of creative generation, collaboration, exchange, and making. It follows in the spirit of our Living Room Lectures, in which guest talks were live-streamed, and the seminars we have hosted in our domestic space. Underlying all of these is a blurring of the lines between public and private, and a conviction that the home, despite its humble and intimate scale, can function as a cultural centre, if not a hearth.
