The Europeaum Scholar Programme: Sobremesa enters the realm of EU policy
July 11, 2026 – November 29, 2027
Harris Manchester College, Oxford
In July, Sobremesa’s Artistic Director, Aishwarya Kumar, joined the first module of the Europaeum Scholars Programme 2026–2027 @the_europaeum in Oxford as part of the programme’s 5th cohort. Over the coming year, this journey will continue across Oxford, Brussels, Budapest, Geneva, Luxembourg, and Lammi, extending Sobremesa: Vagaries of the Palate beyond its current geographies through a series of roundtables, brainstorming session, policy research, stakeholder mapping, and fieldwork towards the second phase of Sobremesa. The project enters into dialogue with ongoing work on migration, artistic research, and cultural heritage - engaging directly with questions of social cohesion and integration policy in contemporary Europe. Situated between her PhD and Sobremesa, Aishwarya’s practice foregrounds the creative industries - particularly artistic research and embodied methodologies - as contributive to ground-level policy thinking, where public-facing formats become sites for testing, translating, and complicating top-down frameworks of integration. At the heart of this inquiry is a persistent question: what can the infrastructure, sociality, and gestures at the table reveal about how we live together? Beyond gathering and conviviality, can it offer another way of thinking about belonging, difference, disagreement, and social cohesion - particularly in the post-consumption moment, where conversation lingers beyond structured narratives of inclusion? In a time of increasing polarization, the project remains attentive to the spaces where conversation persists across difference; while also confronting the limits, rather than the promises, of togetherness.
July 11, 2026 – November 29, 2027
Harris Manchester College, Oxford
In July, Sobremesa’s Artistic Director, Aishwarya Kumar, joined the first module of the Europaeum Scholars Programme 2026–2027 @the_europaeum in Oxford as part of the programme’s 5th cohort. Over the coming year, this journey will continue across Oxford, Brussels, Budapest, Geneva, Luxembourg, and Lammi, extending Sobremesa: Vagaries of the Palate beyond its current geographies through a series of roundtables, brainstorming session, policy research, stakeholder mapping, and fieldwork towards the second phase of Sobremesa. The project enters into dialogue with ongoing work on migration, artistic research, and cultural heritage - engaging directly with questions of social cohesion and integration policy in contemporary Europe. Situated between her PhD and Sobremesa, Aishwarya’s practice foregrounds the creative industries - particularly artistic research and embodied methodologies - as contributive to ground-level policy thinking, where public-facing formats become sites for testing, translating, and complicating top-down frameworks of integration. At the heart of this inquiry is a persistent question: what can the infrastructure, sociality, and gestures at the table reveal about how we live together? Beyond gathering and conviviality, can it offer another way of thinking about belonging, difference, disagreement, and social cohesion - particularly in the post-consumption moment, where conversation lingers beyond structured narratives of inclusion? In a time of increasing polarization, the project remains attentive to the spaces where conversation persists across difference; while also confronting the limits, rather than the promises, of togetherness.
