Fugitive Bakery's un-recipe-like recipe book

Friendship as pedagogy

Abstract

Our reception and consumption of cultural scholarship often fall under a hierarchy of mediums, where
text-based pieces are deemed superior to alternative and digitally porous forms of knowledge transfer
such as YouTube videos, social media content, verbal and gestural activations, and more. This
emphasis is reinforced through traditional forms of pedagogy that operate in a one-way social order
between lecturer and pupil. This structural obsession toward text-exclusive, one-way pedagogic
practice limits the contaminative possibility of knowledge. The incorporation of public pedagogy in the
contemporary art domain enhances the potential for commoning. Likewise, an artist's increasing
agency in initiating public pedagogy correlates with the expanding definition of what a contemporary
art initiative can be.
Fugitive Bakery is a concept bakery that invites its collaborators to share their personal
responses to and interpretations of scholarly and non-scholarly texts with Anathapindika Dai and Liza
Markus—collectively known as Dika+Lija—in exchange for handmade baked goods provided free of
charge. In an anti-academic spirit, the duo ‘digest’ the books through baking and dialogue. In line with
their anti-capitalist beliefs, they provide each Bake free of charge while resisting set menus and rigid
working hours. Through this, the duo aims to address untraceable productivities, abstract values of
labour, hoarding of resources, profit maximisation, greed, hierarchies of scholarly credibility, the
insatiable need for factual accuracy, and the bias of statistics, ego, and pride.