Long-table meals and thought-provoking subjects, as Indian Summer Festival offers three-part Tiffin Talk series, July 7

Topics include the meaning of comfort food, music’s role in community empowerment, and cultural appropriation in fashion

By Gail Johnson

Tonye Aganaba. Photo by Liz Roza photography

Indian Summer Festival presents Tiffin Talk: A Taste of Nostalgia on July 7 from 12 pm to 2 pm; Tiffin Talk: Music As Resistance from 3 pm to 5 pm; and Tiffin Talk: The Line Between from 6 pm to 8 pm at Jharokha Garden at Performance Works on Granville Island in a copresentation with SFU’s David Lam Centre

A HIGHLIGHT OF the annual Indian Summer Festival, the Tiffin Talk series is back for 2024, with three distinct sessions. Each gathering features a 45-minute dialogue with guest speakers followed by a long-table meal served in traditional individual Indian-style tiffins, a kind of lunch box that’s typically a vertical, stackable stainless-steel container.

Kicking things off is Tiffin Talk: A Taste of Nostalgia from 12 pm to 2 pm. Shiva Reddy, host of the four-part Telus docu-series Not Your Butter Chicken, leads the conversation with Asha Wheeldon, the chef-founder of Kula Kitchen, a vegan African-food venture, and Trixie Ling, who heads Flavours of Hope, a program that helps immigrant women start their own culinary business. They’ll be discussing the meaning of comfort food and the ways it can evoke memories and instill a sense of heritage and identity.

Tiffin Talk: Music As Resistance follows from 3 pm to 5 pm. Moderated by Black African queer nonbinary multidisciplinary artist Tonye Aganaba, the event features Tiffany Ayalik, who’s one half of the sibling duo PIQSIQ, a traditional Inuit throat-singing act, and choral artist Hussein Janmohamed. Touching on the intersection of art and activism, the three will discuss music’s role in decolonization and community empowerment.

Finally, Tiffin Talk: The Line Between runs from 6 pm to 8 pm. It will be moderated by Manjot Bains, who is the former cofounder of ANARA, a modern textiles brand, and former editor-in-chief of Jugni Style, an arts and culture magazine. Joining Bains are speakers Tafui, a Jamaican artist and designer who splits her time between Vancouver and Ottawa, and Bernarda Antony of The Batik Library, who works to preserve Indonesian culture through batik workshops and clothing design. The discussion will look at the difference between cultural appreciation and appropriation, as well as methods through which artisans can protect their traditional styles even as Indigenous textiles and international fabrics make their way into mainstream fashion.

The Indian Summer Festival continues until July 14. 

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