annam&friends
Creative research studio — food, home & collective storytelling
annam&friends is a creative research studio exploring how food traditions are carried and transformed across people, places, and time. It focuses on home cooking, everyday meals, and the memories attached to kitchens and dining spaces.
The studio builds an ongoing archive of food and home narratives through collaborative and participatory formats, reflecting on migration, nostalgia, and how our relationship to food changes as we move through the world.
annam&friends is currently working on a collaborative project on food and community-based storytelling book with Women of Banglatown, a neighborhood-based community arts organization that provides a supportive, culturally-sensitive space for arts and well-being programming for first generation and immigrant girls and young women (10–26 years of age) from the Banglatown neighborhood of Detroit and Hamtramck.
In the summer of 2025, Shuba facilitated a pickle making workshop with the members of Women of Banglatown, inviting two of their mothers to talk through the process of making achaar (pickle in Bengali/Hindi). The workshop was set up as an outdoor kitchen space where we watched the steps of making a mango and an olive pickle followed by a simple exercise of writing down the recipe right after.
