Burning Man: Archiving the Ephemeral

During production of our Keepers series, chronicling activist archivists, rogue librarians and keepers of the culture and free flow of information, we received this message on the Keepers Hotline from LadyBee, Archivist & Art Collection Manager at Burning Man: “Hello Kitchen Sisters, I am a rogue archivist, the archivist for Burning Man. Come to Burning Man headquarters and I’ll show you the collection. Cheers.” How do you archive an event when one of it’s driving principles is “leave no trace,” where The Burning Man is in fact burned? What is being kept and who is keeping it? We journey into the archives of this legendary gathering to find out.

Archive Fever

In honor of the Olympics in Paris and the eyes of the world being on France and the astounding contribution of the French to the culture and art of the world, we reprise our story Archive Fever: Henri Langlois and the founding and history of The Cinematheque Francaise. Featuring Francis Ford Coppola, Wim Wenders, Tom Luddy, Lotte Eisner, Simone Signoret, Agnes Varda, Costa-Gavras, Barbet Schroeder and more.

Linda Ronstadt Day

San Francisco has declared July 15 as Linda Ronstadt Day, in honor of the 78th birthday of this legendary singer. In her honor, we present this story about her memoir Feels Like Home: A Song for the Sonoran Borderlands, a musical, historical, edible memoir that spans the story of five generations of Linda’s Mexican American German family, from the Sonoran desert in Mexico to the Ronstadt family hardware store in Tucson to the road that led Linda to LA and musical stardom.

Laying the Groundwork:

In 1977, a cavernous, rarely used sculpture gallery in the Brooklyn Museum was filled with drafting tables, their tops tilted to display collages of the work and under-told stories of women working in architecture in the United States.
We revisit this first significant effort to publicly tell the little known stories of American women in architecture: “Women in American Architecture: A Historic and Contemporary Perspective.”

Dissident Kitchens

After the Russian Revolution of 1917, millions of people poured into Moscow from the countryside, many living crammed together in the appropriated grand apartments of the wealthy — a single, communal kitchen shared by the ten or so families squeezed together under one roof. Spaces were crowded, food scarce, privacy nonexistent.After Stalin’s death in 1953, Nikita Khrushchev came to power. His new Soviet government built hundreds of huge standardized apartment buildings with single family units, each with their own kitchen. These new, private kitchens became hotbeds of politics, forbidden music, literature – “dissident kitchens” where the seeds of ending the Soviet Union were sewn.

Support the Stories

Deep thanks to all of you who support the work of The Kitchen Sisters. Without your collaboration and contributions, our stories, internship, and mentoring program would not be possible.

The Kitchen Sisters Present… Stories from the b-side of history. Lost recordings, hidden worlds, people possessed by a sound, a vision, a mission. Each podcast episode tell deeply layered stories, lush with interviews, field recordings and music. Including stories from our NPR series Hidden Kitchens, The Hidden World of Girls, The Sonic Memorial Project, Lost & Found Sound, and The Keepers.

The Kitchen Sisters Present is proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of the best story-driven podcasts on the planet.

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