CRICAO

Colab Quarter theme: Territory
Values: Creolization, cultural rights
Skills: artistic production, culinary design, ethnology
Experiences: cross-sectoral territorial projects, international tours, international projects
Fields: Citizenship, Migration, Creation
Disciplines: Music, culinary design, visual arts
Projects: Center of World Cultures

CRICAO is an association that promotes the crossing of cultures and aesthetic by producing and broadcasting artists whose creations are the fruit of fruitful and innovative encounters between cultures of different origins, by developing a cultural action based on the transmission of the cultures of the world in specialized circles and on different territories and by organizing events where the territory is the support for meetings between places, inhabitants and aesthetics.
For several years, the CRICAO association has been carrying out cultural projects on neighborhoods of Toulouse, associating creative and commercial, including around culinary design. These projects may take the form of collaboration between local designers and restorers or performance associates visual artists, culinary designers and local people carrying a culinary heritage.
With the kitchen as a tool, the association makes possible a real mix of audiences. Assuming everyone eats and everyone has the opportunity to cook, which brings everyone together.
The Katchakatcha project developed since 2013 by CRICAO, brings together a researcher, a visual artist and a culinary designer. This artistic team keeps working with a group of people associated with a kitchen workshop of cultural centers and other structures where cooking is the main activity.
The first phase of Katchakatcha is that of the encounter, they cook sets, exchanging recipes, but also exchanges on their lives, this phase can last for several months or weeks.
The second phase involves the production of a culinary design concept that feeds on this meeting. The cooked dishes are transformed to be part of the final phase, a performance of global culinary design integrating the processed dishes in a transformed public space in which the public will find themselves for a shared banquet.
Each performance is different. It changes according to encountered people, raised issues, the space that will accommodate the performance, of the territory of the meeting and involved cultures.
Katchakatcha meets with great success. The project is requested for various territories, where there is a need to bring people together, to involve communities that are not easily seen in the public space. Katchatcha was part of the Tandem Turkey 2016 project, to bring out the evolution of culinary habits according to the migrations. In Gaziantep the Turks rub shoulders with Syrians and Kurdish. In Toulouse, CRICAO works with populations arrived since several generations, mostly from North Africa.
Cricao works with the City of Toulouse, and the Midi-Pyrénées region, it is supported by civil societies related to the living spectacle: Adami, Spedidam. It also works with social landlords (Heritage, developers (OPIDEA) and scientific teams, notably with Jean- Jaurès University via LISST (Interdisciplinary Laboratory of Solidarities, Societies, Territories) which is a mixed research unit with broad thematic coverage combining Specialist geographers in the city, sociologists and anthropologists. CRICAO also associates frequently with the Institut Supérieur Colors Image Design who trains designers. ISCID is located in Montauban and depends on the university Toulouse Jean Jaurès.