Souped Up: Slow Building of Support Networks Through Commensality

Maharani, Marsya; Wallen, Geneviève

Marsya Maharani and Geneviève Wallen reflect on their recent, ongoing project Souped Up. Through this chapter they revisit how the project manifested over the course of the past year, elaborating on the different iterations and sharing their goals and wishes for this platform. Souped Up explores communal meals and the creation of long-term reciprocal caring systems. For each meal the hope is to encourage community instead of competition amongst racialized arts practitioners conditioned to have a scarcity mentality, while also contributing to a supportive ecosystem for co-mentorship, radical friendship, resource-sharing, and collective governance as primary foundations. Around their table, there is no need for the maintenance of an over-theorized space, the guests do not have to be burdened with legitimizing goals. While mobilizing, they can also just be.