Cocinas Alterinas is a critical design collective co-founded in 2019 by the Swiss-Egyptian designer Mayar El Barkry and the Peruvian landscape architect and artist Gabriela Aquije Zegarra—their work centers around the investigation of food in relation to space, ecologies, and politics.

Rooted in their diverse cultural backgrounds and extensive artistic expertise, Cocinas Alterinas collaborates to create various formats, including workshops, short films, and performative dinners, that explore the complex systems of specific crops and cooking processes. Through this work, they seek to reflect and mediate plural visions of design, using locally sourced ingredients, communal cooking, and eating practices to foster a deeper connection between people, their environment, and their food. 

At the heart of their practice lies a commitment to exploring the kitchen as a site of care, recreation, and resistance while forging meaningful connections between local and global partners and communities.

Gabriela Aquije Zegarra (Peru) is a landscape architect and design researcher. She holds an MSc. Design Research (2020) by the COOP program of the Bauhaus Foundation Dessau, Anhalt University of Applied Sciences, and the Humboldt University of Berlin. Since then, she combines her former landscape design practice and temporary installation design with her current focus (and passion) on food systems research. She developed a way of working that is anchored in a collaborative practice: either gardening or cooking collectively, as well as with public performances and design experiments. She takes this holistic way of creating to the MAKE/SENSE Ph.D. program in practice-based research in art and design, hosted by the FHNW Academy of Art and Design in Basel and the University of Art and Design in Linz. Her project “Culinary Re-turn: gastro-political ecologies of indigenous cooking landscapes in Peru” explores cooking as an aesthetical, interspecies, and decolonial design practice.

Mayar El Bakry (she/her) is a multidisciplinary designer, researcher, curator, and hyphen collector. Her current projects focus on shifting identities and how food/cooking can mediate these ambiguities and entanglements. She is interested in creating spaces of exchange, collaboration, and dialogue. Her approaches are deeply rooted in decolonial, intersectional feminist, and post-migratory studies and practices. Next to her research and commissions, she's a lecturer at the Academy of Art and Design in Basel and a guest professor at the Fachhochschule Salzburg.

Heidi Boulanger is an architect, designer, and researcher. She obtained her M.Arch(prof)(cum laude) from UP in 2013, and practiced as a professional Architect and independent researcher before joining UCT as a full-time academic in 2021. Her work focuses on regenerative practice and Architecture as systemic design through the lenses of biophilia, ecological urbanism, landscape systems, bioremediation, and rewilding. Her praxis and pedagogy try to merge architecture, landscape and ecology, and explores themes of critical regionalism, new vernacular architecture, adaptive re-use, circular design strategies, bio-materiality, water and ‘waste’. Heidi is currently a convenor in the BAS3 programme and a member of the Future Water Institute at UCT.

Chisomo Phiri is a doctoral student in the School of Architecture, Planning and Geomatics at the University of Cape Town (UCT). His master’s degree was in architectural studies, and is a registered architect with SACAP. I was the resident PhD student with the Livable Neighbourhoods (LN) research project from 2019-2022. The project has since concluded, He is now involved in ES and BAS courses as a facilitator and co-convenor. Chisomo research revolves around water scarcity. A full 1.8 million people world-wide face water scarcity, 2 million lack access to sanitation. According to Sue Roaf and David Crichton (2009) our global concern for the future will be the issue of water security. Soon we will find ourselves in need of a freshwater resource to meet our growing demands (Novotny et al. 2010). Water scarcity has already hit the city of Cape Town in an impactful way. Day zero a watchword from the previous drought alerted South Africa to an impending lack of water. Around this emergency Capetonians banded together to reduce reuse and recycle water. Social concerns were revisited, and the urgency of the situation encouraged unity. lessons learned during this event raise a lamp on the day-to-day modus operandi. Studies have since shown that during the period when water reserves were at an all-time low Capetonian value and care towards water management increased.