Recipes for an Encounter functions as a literary extension to the 2008 group exhibition “Kits for an Encounter” at Vancouver’s Western Front, which consisted of work that actively engages the viewer by providing the necessary components for instigating or troubling the notion of an encounter. This collection of texts, diagrams, and illustrations provides further “how-to” instruction for relational projects in the manner of a recipe book.

“As instructions that foretell of future culinary moments based on those from the past, the act of writing a recipe always occurs as a deliberate pause, temporally displaced from its actuation. Consider, for example, computer viruses whose execution might result in a technological disaster; the architectural plans for a utopian city based on its existing infrastructural and schematological remains; instructions on making the ideal Molotov Cocktail; or preparatory directions for the antidote to a life-threatening poison that is otherwise tenuously passed through speech over millennia. For these written constitutions that are intended to change or preserve the future, their adherence only enunciates the interpretive space between writing and enactment. Through an interdisciplinary lens that brings together art, architecture, literature, and political science, Recipes for an Encounter explores the anticipatory nature of recipes together with their promise of what will unfold, take place, be consumed.” –from the publisher

Contributors include Lisa Anne Auerbach, Adrian Blackwell, The Center for Tactical Magic, Max Goldfarb, Karen Hakobian, Janice Kerbel, LIGNA, Jaime O’Shea, Kristina Lee Podesva & Alan McConchie, Vahida Ramujkic, Francisco J. Ricardo, The Shakers of Enfield, Noa Treister, Matt Volla, and Sharif Waked & Molly Keogh.