Artist Statement

Exhibition. Centre Culturel Canadien, May 16 – 20

“Within commodity culture, ethnicity becomes spice, seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture.” _Bell Hooks, in Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance

Cook Your Way is a game about how immigration systems and capitalist discourses of multiculturalism combine. In the game’s fiction, visa applicants (or players) are instructed by immigration authorities to prepare a typical dish of their country of origin using a cooking station. The system evaluates applicants according to their efficiency and potential to contribute to the destination country’s society. Cooking becomes a standardized test, one step within a longer application process.

Players act through a cooking station alternative controller, a custom-built device with interactive components for different actions, like adding ingredients, stirring a pot or chopping
vegetables. Using the system involves performing gestures that resemble actions of food preparation, but recontextualized and filtered through particular lenses. Such actions are closely monitored and should be done as instructed. These prompts are intertwined with questions and comments adapted from actual immigration forms and brochures.

Cook Your Way combines humor and pointed critique. It highlights the tensions and significance of cultural commodification and the purposeful complexity and alienation involved in immigration systems. Through play, it aims to raise questions and reflections about the multimodal interfaces of control, labor, and the meritocratic narratives that permeate immigration.
https://enric.llagostera.com.br/cookyourway

Credits & acknowledgement
Game created by Enric Granzotto Llagostera.
Videos, photography and documentation graphics by Vjosana Shkurti.
Music from https://filmmusic.io: “Modern Jazz Samba” by Kevin MacLeod. Licence: CC BY; Intro music by John Bartmann.
Special thanks for their ongoing support and various contributions to this project: Carolina Chmielewski Tanaka, Rilla Khaled, Rebecca Goodine, Jess Rowan Marcotte, Dietrich
Squinkifer.

Cook Your Way was created in Montréal, QC, Canada, from 2017-2019. It received support from the Hexagram Student Grant and the Reflective Game Design research group at the Technoculture, Art and Games Research Centre.

• Enric Granzotto Llagostera is a game designer and researcher from São Paulo, Brazil, currently based in Montreal, Canada. He studies alternative game controllers and how they can foster reflection and engage in political critique. He has a background in programming and social communication and a keen interest in experimental and DIY play devices, community organizing, and public play. Enric has previously worked as a lecturer, teaching about game development, and is currently a PhD candidate at Concordia University.  enric.llagostera.com.br