Rebecca Khamala

Some of my earliest experiences of cooking come from preparing “grab” as a family before each boarding school term – a week-long festival of cooking, sun-drying, frying, & roasting seeds, making daddies, & odi – that fostered togetherness, ritual, & shared labour. These moments shaped my understanding of food as a connective & emotional practice. This deepened while caring for my sister Martha during chemotherapy & remission, where cooking for her became an act of love & presence. After her passing, these memories remain a source of solace & shape my personal relationship to food as a site of memory, care, & healing. I approach cooking as a practice of healing, where the kitchen becomes a space to process loss & materialise moments of silence. 

This perspective informs my work, Nga Kitalo, which explores mourning through embodied, performative acts such as cooking. Preparing food becomes a way of enacting grief, giving form to absence, & creating space for reflection & remembrance. My interest in the residency also stems from health-oriented inquiries that emerged from personal loss, drawing me to explore fermented & probiotic foods in Ugandan cuisine as a pathway to gut & mental wellbeing. My practice examines the relationships between material culture, food

cultures, & local ecosystems. Grounded in process, I centre acts of making, treating cooking as placemaking – an embodied practice where creative work transforms emotional experience into tangible, reflective moments.