The Funnest Room in the House Returns
Posted on 19 September 2025This June, artist Anna Maria Nabirye will host a pop-up of Black British Kitchens: The Funnest Room in the House at Towner. This blog post details the re-launch of the project after a tragic fire, with a gathering at Whitechapel Gallery to listen to the kitchen stories that inspired the work and talk about personal archiving in Global Majority Communities.
Date: 8 May 2025
Location: Creation Studio Whitechapel Gallery
Team: Nicky Childs, Genova Messiah, Anna Maria Nabirye, Seung Sing, Helen Skiera
On 8 May 8 2025, we held an event to mark the re-opening of The Funnest Room in the House, just shy of three years after the first attempt of this project was destroyed by fire. But rather than being housed in a cockle shed on Whitstable Harbour, we were in the Creation Studio of Whitechapel Gallery.
In 2022, I made an audio work about the destroyed work in place of the installation that never opened. I used my research material - interviews with friends, family and members of my local community in Hastings about kitchens in their past that felt most significant. These interviews were intended to be used to guide me in creating an installation inspired by many pasts, but they had become the work in lieu of anything left to show.
Fast forward to 2025; I am sat in the Whitechapel Gallery as the sun sets over East London - joined by those friends, family and community members who I interviewed back in 2022 with a group of strangers, peers and other friends, who have all gathered to re-open the work, once again celebrating the kitchen as a portal to ancestral homelands.
Space & food is important to me, as you might have guessed. The room was set up to be as cosy and inviting as possible, with bean bags, chairs arranged in horse shoe configurations and soft lighting tinted with pinks and yellows, to mirror the sun setting outside. A table laden with tasty treats: plantain chips, samosas (with this gorgeous coriander & mint dip made by a beloved friend who couldn’t make the event, but wanted to be present nonetheless), a fruit platter of sweetness pineapple, lichees, grapes and other sun-soaked offerings. My mum, Joy, had made over 100 mandazis - a soft, sweet Ugandan treat somewhere between a doughnut and bread - fried light, doughy balls sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar. Congolese Soukous set the rhythm from the speakers. Folks ate, drank and ate again. Shoulders rubbing up against each other whilst dishing out chutney softened the space for strangers to open conversations. Once everyone was sated, we sat, and using silent disco headphones, listened to a reworking of the audio piece made in 2022. But rather than sitting in the shock of what was lost, and what I had dreamed the work to be, the reworking shifted back and forth through time and memory right up to the present day. Three years is not a long time, but after the pandemic, parental bereavement and a shift in career focus, now we listened not just with the hope - but with an actual concrete plan for the next phase of this work. Afterword:Whitechapel spoke to the present moment. Hindsight included.
When creating this listening event, I wondered what it would be like to listen to this work seated - it was originally made as a site-specific promenade piece, to be listened to whilst walking along the harbour arm, passing the site of the destroyed installation and ending up looking out to sea. But here, in this top-floor studio on Whitechapel High Street, I watched as a group of people, mostly strangers, collectively listened to the same stories, each transported to their own kitchens and their own communities through their own memories, all playing alongside mine.
We gathered in a circle after listening to the piece and heard reflections from the original interviewees on the process of talking about their kitchens, how it felt revisiting it after some time and having those interviews shared publicly. We were also joined by Genova Messiah from the Tower Hamlets Archive, who spoke about the importance of archiving personal stories and family history, especially from Global Majority communities. How archiving had really shifted the power dynamic supporting folks to share personal archives in ways that felt respectful to them and their ancestors. The thoughts, reflections and memories shared from the wider audience were stimulating and heart warming and, of course, we ended with more food and tunes.