mata-mata media

20/01/2021

Thank you Gökcen . We learnt a lot about Turkish food culture and history. These are excerpts of the texts that appear on our foodstorycards.

madrabaz brings you …

“börek” (An der Marie - Prenzlauer Berg) … Börek in the Turkish language refers to any dish made with “Yufka” - thin, flaky dough made from flour, water and salt, very similar to filo pastry. The Sigara böreği is Yufka filled with feta cheese and rolled into a cigarette shape . We love having it as a Meze or as part of our breakfast. ...

“ekmek” (Monbijou Park - Mitte) This one is for the history enthusiasts among us, the story of the most important piece of a Turkish meal: Bread. … Curious – too much text to put here …

“peynir” (Monbijou Park - Mitte) … French and Italians may have more to say when it comes down to cheese platters for wine and other uses of cheese like on the pizza, but the Turks dominate the field with their breakfast cheese culture. No Turkish breakfast table is complete without any cheese on it. ...

“cay” (Hauptbahnhof - Tiergarten) We Turks love our tea. Any excuse is a good excuse to drink it. Tea keeps you warm in winter and cools you down in summer. It is the icebreaker when meeting a complete stranger, and a warm welcome we extend to anyone we encounter in our life. …

“menemen & sucuk” (Savignyplatz - Charlottenburg) It is mind blowing when one thinks of how many ways there are to serve an egg. A simple life-giving part of nature can be a defining piece of a cuisine’s approach to breakfast. Menemen is the greatest example of such a dish. Imagine the amount of umami in a combination of eggs, butter, tomatoes and peppers …

“Ispanaklı kek” (An der Marie - Prenzlauer Berg) - You can’t get your kids to eat spinach? Use the Turkish trick – put it in a cake. … Complement it with a cheesy cream for that extra oomph. … It is a very Turkish cake which has traveled far and wide, and now has become quite Irish as it is recommended by many bakers as something to make for St. Patrick’s Day. Forget the carrot cake. Green is the new orange.

12/01/2021

2018: we produced a series of postcards featuring foods in a typical Turkish breakfast to reflect madrabaz’s wish to tell the stories behind them. We shot in locations around Berlin. Gökcen, Hanno and Zaki had loads of fun, especially with some shoots where passers-by wondered what we were up to. On the flipside were the narratives. The cards were used during the Turkish breakfast event hosted by and mata-mata in our private home in Prenzlauer Berg. It was spring. The entire place was full of friends and their friends. Simone and team cooked in our kitchen and also used blok studio’s premises on the ground floor. Thank you .

From Gökcen:
Madrabaz is an experience generator, sometimes a culinary trickster but always a cultural ambassador. A "Madrabaz" was the link between people and food. It was the Madrabaz's mission to bring food from all over the world to the tables of many. Madrabaz helped people to learn, understand, enjoy and love food and its multicultural sources and influences.

wants to create that exciting link between cultures. We offer a platform for conversations while enjoying food; for our guests to connect through ethical, cultural and political issues. We believe the more people learn and understand other cultures the more they can enjoy and love each other.

We choose food and culinary experiences as our centerpiece because food is personal, global and unifying. It touches our souls, our minds and our bellies. Each of us uses it to express love, desire, creativity and more. You can identify a person, a culture or a movement by its culinary choices. Food itself is the most common and rich source of conversation. From flavors to cultural differences, from baking-preservation techniques to bactericides, from land grabbing to climate change, many issues open up at our tables. Eating is a social and a political activity as much as an essential and vital one. This is exactly what makes food so beautiful, so fascinating, interesting and complex.

Stay awhile and listen. We have many stories to share.

10/01/2021

Another menu by Simone for the Food and Film Club from madrabaz . Between our media literature and Gökcen’s vinyl collections, we came up with these.

Main Course
Marinated Tuna, Samphire Salad, Pomegranate Seeds and Bulgur Pilaf

Dessert
Muhallebi (milk pudding) with mastic

10/01/2021

Zaki and Hanno (mata-mata media) have always loved food, especially making and presenting it. We have to thank Tali Arik, our Airbnb guest from the States, and his partner Gökcen Ceylan, originally from Istanbul, for making us realise how much. Flashback 2018. For their new venture in Berlin, madrabaz Gastro-Events , they roped us in to help with the media design and production. We became lifetime friends.

We met their in-house cook Simone Haselier. It was work and fun at the same time. With Simone and Gökcen, we created ideas of how to present their food and ideology which was based on storytelling. It was great to think about the narrative behind Turkish contemporary fusion cooking, with roots in traditional methods and ingredients. Gökcen, Simone, Yurdi and the rest of the madrabaz team offered food and film events. So cool.

Apart from this, we organised food events in our home and shop in the Kollwitzstraße in Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin. Once even at the iconic Café Anna Blume.

For their FEMALE DIRECTORS NIGHT

Appetizer
Cold Saffron Almond Soup
with We Are Back Again by Shirel Peleg (Israel/Germany)

Main
Marinated Salmon and Summer Vegetables
with Daddy’s Girl by Melisa Üneri (Finland/Turkey)

Dessert
Elderflower Panna Cotta

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The granite slab is from Zaki‘s family home in Kuala Lumpur. It is part of the ‚bath giling‘ grinding stone which their ‚head chef‘ Uda used for many years to grind onions and chillies for the food she prepared for the family with so much love. It took a long time before she decided that a machine could do just as good a job 🙂❤️.

24/06/2020

Our new short Gestalten is online. Thank you Flora Veit-Wild for trusting us to make this for you. It was a great collaboration. Thank you to Loisey (Hong Kong) for doing such a brilliant job with the audio design, expertly integrating parts from Max's (Flora's son) compositions into his own soundscape. This shows that working remote can turn out extremely well.

https://vimeo.com/matamatamedia/gestalten

GESTALTEN 9 min, 2020 This short features the dolls created by Flora Veit-Wild over a period of many years. Lady in Black, Tod der Mutter, Kunigunde, Crab Attack…

10/03/2018

01/12/2017

https://vimeo.com/matamatamedia/samurai

This stop motion animation music clip was made with a team of seven 11-year-olds in Berlin during the [zapf] TrickTruck Animation Workshop of the KUKI 10th International…

01/12/2017

These two music video clips about the colours orange and red were made using stop motion animation by 11-year-old Alba, Antonia, Charlotte, Malte, Nik and Suraya with help from Hanno and Zaki during a workshop for the zapf TrickTruck of the KUKI 10th. International Short Film Festival for Children and Youth Berlin 2017.

The children were totally responsible for the look and feel of the clips. They met once a week during most of the two-month workshop. More often towards the deadline, which was the prize-giving ceremony of the festival on November 26. They started with analysing the texts, developing and sketching characters and storyline and then testing out the motions. Zaki was responsible for rummaging around and sourcing for fabrics and haberdashery, cutting and glueing for the characters and the scenes.

The songs, which are part of a series about colours and patterns, were written by Josepha Conrad for mata-mata medien UG. It was for the children's media project "play-play", which received support from the medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg.

https://vimeo.com/matamatamedia/orange
https://vimeo.com/matamatamedia/samurai

This stop motion animation music clip was made with a team of seven 11-year-olds in Berlin during the [zapf] TrickTruck Animation Workshop of the KUKI 10th International…