Beggar's Food

 

I'm Hungry/ Are You Hungry?

Concept

 

The chefs of Beggar's Food will offer the public who are participating in the performance a bowl of soup, a dish that is connected to the simple and poor culinary tradition. An example of social diet, soup is capable of seducing taste, giving comfort and protecting from the cold of winter in a genuine and economical way.

 

Beggar's Food is an event connected to food and the pleasure of the palate, but at the same time it is a prototype for the creation of a new economical model, an inversion of the mechanism of supply/demand for those who live in difficult social and economical situations.

 

"I'm Hungry" is a statement, but at the same time a question, which crowds around the streets of Milan in a problematic way: on sidewalks, in the underground, on streetcars, these places are stages for increasingly pressured requests from those who are hungry, those who do not have a roof over their head, those who do not even have the bare minimum to be able to survive. The demand for food passes through the cleanliness of a car windscreen at a traffic light, the gadgets of street sellers, the roses given at restaurant tables, the petulant echoes of a question that multiplies uncontrollably. The answer is often detachment toward those requests, and in many cases, exploitation of them.

 

In a liberal economy the economical relationships are regulated by law and by supply and demand. By demand of something we mean its request by a group at a certain price in any given moment. A poor person does not have money, cannot achieve a price, and this is why his or her demand is excluded from the market place. An economical exclusion that becomes a social exclusion and feeds mechanisms of exploitation of work force. The work force is the only offer that a poor person can give by lowering their price. Immigration, a phenomenon that feeds the growth of the number of poor people in Western economies, becomes a place filled with human patrimony where the manufacturing companies reap benefits through the cost of work, meaning immigrant labour, at a very low cost.

 

The reduction of the cost of labour is one of the strategies through which companies can optimize their gains: by paying their workers less they can reduce their costs and so raise their final gain. To do this many manufacturing companies delocalize the production, that means that they move their production outside of Italy, in countries like those of Eastern Europe that have lower labour costs than our country.

 

Some kinds of manufacturing companies cannot apply this mechanism of delocalization because of the nature of their production, which needs for example a connection between the moment of production and that of sale. This type of manufacturing company uses different strategies to reduce the costs of work by staying in Italy.

 

Among this kind of activity lies, for example, restoration, where immigrants and new poor people are often used, who offer themselves to the market at low costs and without contractual guarantees. When faced with the problem of the impossibility of exploiting the immigrant in his own country, through the delocalization of production, some types of production find ways, mostly illegal ways, to exploit them "at home".

 

The problem of the question "I'm Hungry" and its consequences are at the core of the concept of Beggar's Food. The performance takes its title from Berthold Brecht's "Three Penny Opera", which was inspired by the satirical comedy "The Beggar's Opera" by John Gay in 1727. In the original text, Gay makes the poor people, the beggars, into the pariahs of society, heroes of a world turned upside down. Gay triggers an overturn of the values of his contemporary London to represent the image of corruption and immorality of the political system of high society as a reflection.

 

In the same way, the performance Beggar's Food isolates the social phenomenon of the excluded, the poor man, and makes him a street action, a situation where he can take part, provoking an overturning of the rules with which to play. Beggar's Food inverts the burning question of the poor man by transforming it until it becomes an offering: "I'm Hungry" becomes "Are you Hungry?". Thanks to the competence and experience of Massimo Bernardi and the staff of Dissapore, the poor man enters into the world of food, becoming a person who offers something instead of a victim of his own question.

 

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Dissapore presents

Beggar' s Food

 

 

I'm Hungry / Are You Hungry?

FoodPower performance

Tuesday February 2nd, 2010 - 5.30 PM

Milan | Piazza Argentina

Concept | Franca Formenti

Tuesday the 2nd of February 2010 at 5.30 PM Dissapore presents Beggar's Food | I'm Hungry / Are You Hungry?, a performance developed by the artist Franca Formenti and created in collaboration with the director of Dissapore, Massimo Bernardi.

 

The event was triggered by FoodPower, a project created by Franca Formenti in 2007 and developed into a series of actions and performances through which to re-think about food, intended as a core instrument of power mechanisms.

 

It's not a coincidence that at the beginning of the new century food has become, as did happen at the dawn of modernity, a cultural phenomenon. We are going through a phase of social transformation, of adaptation to a new form of capitalism, the capitalism of knowledge. In this new phase food becomes a central cultural object.

 

"We are idealistically used to the fact that culture is in the high ranks of our life, that's it's a bit above us, that it is the highest and most noble product of our brain, often forgetting about our stomach. In some moments of transition food becomes "food for thought". Food reminds us that our body keeps being the privileged instrument of our thoughts, and even some of the more immaterial, noble and vile things that human beings can produce". (Antonio Caronia)

 

FoodPower is a work in progress of actions and situations that involve the audience and professionals of the world of food, creative incursions that act on the various ways of experiencing food and the behaviour that it creates.

 

At the same time with the 2010 edition of the Milan congress of "Identità Golose" (Gluttonous Identities), a meeting of international importance dedicated to authorial cuisine Beggar's Food | I'm Hungry / Are You Hungry? In Milan, in Piazza Argentina, will have a food stand, where the public can buy food prepared by exceptional chefs.

Beggar's Food will be an occasion to taste dishes prepared by some homeless immigrants, who, after having been trained by the Dissapore staff, which is a reference point for the world of food in its various meanings, have acquired a high level of competence and professionalism in the restoration field.

 

The chefs will give the public that take part in the performance a bowl of soup, a dish that is connected to the tradition of "poor" cuisine. An example of social diet, soup is capable of seducing taste, nurturing healthily and protecting from the cold weather of winter in a genuine and economical way. Beggar's Food is an event connected to food and the pleasure of the palate, but at the same time it is a prototype for the creation of a new economical model, an inversion of the mechanism of supply/demand for those who live in difficult social and economical situations. "I'm Hungry" is a statement, but at the same time a question, which crowds around the streets of Milan in a problematic way: on sidewalks, in the underground, on streetcars, these places are stages for increasingly pressured requests from those who are hungry, those who do not have a roof over their head, those who do not even have the bare minimum to be able to survive. The demand for food passes through the cleanliness of a car windscreen at a traffic light, the gadgets of street sellers, the roses given at restaurant tables, the petulant echoes of a question that multiplies uncontrollably. The answer is often detachment toward those requests, and in many cases, exploitation of them.

 

The problem of the question "I'm Hungry" and its consequences are at the core of the concept of Beggar's Food. The performance takes its title from Berthold Brecht's "Three Penny Opera", which was inspired by the satirical comedy "The Beggar's Opera" by John Gay in 1727. In the original text, Gay makes the poor people, the beggars, into the pariahs of society, heroes of a world turned upside down. Gay triggers an overturn of the values of his contemporary London to represent the image of corruption and immorality of the political system of high society as a reflection.

 

In the same way, the performance Beggar's Food isolates the social phenomenon of the excluded, the poor man, and makes him a street action, a situation where he can take part, provoking an overturning of the rules with which to play. Beggar's Food inverts the burning question of the poor man by transforming it until it becomes an offering: "I'm Hungry" becomes "Are you Hungry?". Thanks to the competence and experience of Massimo Bernardi and the staff of Dissapore, the poor man enters into the world of food, becoming a person who offers something instead of a victim of his own question. An offer that creates an economical offer, seeing as the public will be able to give money back. A donation or the umpteenth hand-out, and a symbol that is firmly in the "space" of the performance is the relationship between food-money that is at the base of the liberal economy.

 

Beggar's Food will be a video, created by Franca Formenti, and visible on the Food Power website (www.foodpower.it).

 

Dissapore was founded in 2009 by Massimo Bernardi in collaboration with a series of associated editors, with the objective of creating an informative and thought-provoking space on food and wine and to give an impression in real time on top gastronomical news. Designed by Tiziano Fogliata with the graphics of Antonio Tomacelli, Dissapore wants to be an encounter between the traditional editorial model of a magazine and the innovative one of a blog. A editing team of dynamic collaborators who mix text content with multimedia, thanks to the video contributions, to propose an antidote to the daily dose of gastronomical journalism that is insipid and servile, lightened by the pleasure of discovering, cooking, eating and sharing good food. Beggar's Food is an event created by Franca Formenti, developed in collaboration with Massimo Bernardi and Dissapore (www.dissapore.com).

 

Media partners and press: Digicult (www.digicult.it). Critical text: Antonio Caronia Video, directing and editing: Franca Formenti

 

Beggar' s Food

 

 

I'm Hungry / Are You Hungry?

Tuesday February 2nd, 2010 - 5.30 PM

Location: Piazza Argentina - Milano

Concept: Franca Formenti

Link: www.foodpower.it | www.dissapore.com

Info: info@foodpower.it | press@digicult.it

Ufficio stampa: Claudia D"Alonzo (Digicult)| mail: press@digicult.it | tel: +39 347 8566487

 

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Food in the street or road or street, but always on the road.

 

Food on the street or from the street but always street food. The street is a metaphor for those who do not have a roof over their head or a job, who are forced to leave their country or who are simply tired of being a part of a ruthless mechanism that does not forgive those who lag behind.

 

A Milanese street or piazza in winter could be experienced with the hope of being able to withstand the urban cold at least for one last time, despite the difficulties.

 

Milan has always been the quintessential city of business, a city to "drink up", and now thanks to the Expo, to eat up, or rather gobble up with the risk of overeating without having tasted the best part.

 

It's renowned that the capitalist economy like that which permeates Milanese life is, or is trying to go back to being, greedy, bulimic and tends to eat up even if it's not hungry, just for the sake of accumulating, with the ambition of going back to being an imposing figure on the global market as it was in the past, when it shone thanks to fashion and design. The new key of its success can be found in the art of cuisine, especially the cuisine which created Identità Golose, a sublime and capricious event with a prima donna syndrome which threatens to elegantly and masterfully overshadow the famous fashion weeks and design events.

 

Will it be the new star of Milan's business future? Will it be the one to make the young brokers of Piazza Affari dance on their tables? Will it consecrate the star system of great chefs as new icons of the third Millennium?

 

Foodpower says yes, it will change the cards on the Milanese table, changing its coordinates with innovative joy and controversy, transforming the map of the fashion quadrilateral into a food and wine event quadrilateral.

 

And who knows whether fashion and design will adapt and bow down to the new god of food? Even the most chic windows this year exposed food evidently in their advertising campaigns and the attractive Latino man eats with gusto and virility.

 

Who knows whether the most famous brands will include some culatello or a signature dish just to make ends meet?

 

In the centre of this visionary earthquake of love, jealousy and war of knives, FOODPOWER will try to adapt to the new philosophy in Lombardy, or rather, in Milan, the running city, and will try to take ethic advantage of a homeless person by inviting him to become aware of himself and optimizing his lifestyle to the max, gaining a profit through it. Even if it's just a little, it's still a profit.

 

If the number of people who live on the streets increases, if it annoys people, if it takes away the decorum of the city, why not try to invent a new way of begging for money, one that is paradoxically capable of creating profit?

 

According to the cynical philosophy of profit, every human gesture must be for the sake of trying to create an economical deal, because isn't the economy the greatest pillar in society? Shockeconomy by N. Klein said this.

 

So if we live in a schizophrenic society where multinationals are tyrants and only those who have a sense of business can win, where the battle to change means nothing if it does not distract minds and suffocate the common sense of guilt, then couldn't protest, even if online, become a sort of mass therapy?

 

We are all satisfied and convinced that we have deceived the system which moves millions for the sole fact that we consume electricity in order to connect to the internet.

 

Avoiding tedious digressions about deceit and concentrating on the attention toward the theme of food, let's take "soul-coaches" as an example, such as Dan Lerner, who with rigour and charisma begins the rite of cooking, or rather the star in the kitchen, one of the many excluded from society.

 

The beggar often has a sign reading "I'M HUNGRY"

 

FOODPOWER turned this request around into: "ARE YOU HUNGRY?"

 

Sometimes being hungry does not mean wanting to eat but wanting to be fed by others quickly and caringly.

 

Investigating the growth of the phenomenon of street food, of the consumption of a hot meal outside of the home that restores and reinvigorates the senses.

 

Street food: a vast and mysterious territory, be it from the point of view of being commercial or that of cuisine, at least, that is how it is in Italy.

 

The homeless person offers a brief refreshment service to passers by in exchange for a monetary offering. So why not create a business and transform the slogan from the pianura Padana "let's help them in their home" into "let's use them in our home?"

 

Foodpower represents a daring but necessary and fun innovation of the economical model, trying to overturn the degradation of Milanese streets and to give new life to the traditional northern sitting room.

 

Even begging will become an appetising and money-earning street art action.

 

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Dressing the body,  Feeding the body

 

by Antonio Caronia

 

How can one doubt that food is one of the most important components  of any cultural constellation? How could one forget that one of the  most ambitious reconstructions of universal mythological thought, in  the anthropology of the 1900's, was a "mythology of cuisine", from  the opposition between raw and cooked? How can one put aside the  importance of the studies on "sacrificial cuisine", in classic  Greece, in order to delineate the origins and discontinuities of  Western culture? How can one deny that a study on the apple or on  cheese seems to be the most secure path (even if not the most linear)  to understand the central role of the body in the symbolic universe  of man? Nonetheless... I am not interested (and perhaps I would not  be capable of) trying the umpteenth hybridization between  Lévi−Strauss, Detienne, Vernant and Camporesi. Instead I want to  think about a more modest discussion − which adheres more to  cultural current affairs − on the reasons why today, in journalistic  productions, in artistic projects, in sponsors' agendas, food seems  to be taking the place of fashion. There is no doubt: fashion, which  until the end of the past century seemed to be the element most  adapt to reassuring the bond between material culture and immaterial  culture, in today's viewpoint sets the pace, while food's shares rise. It isn't so much fun to dress bodies anymore, and these bodies  first and foremost need to be fed.

Perhaps it isn't so simple. As usual, we have to deconstruct, take  apart ideological discussions that culture makes about itself,  discussions that are always justifications, mystifications. Much can  be learnt from such mystifications, of course, but on the condition  of turning them upside down, of revealing the unexpressed and hidden  motivations. There's no doubt that food has often played an  important role in the moments of incubation and birth of a new  culture, when it dealt with criticising the rhetorical idealism that  identifies culture with products "from above", from thought, and  recuperating a relationship with the materialness of the body, with  essential human needs. I'm thinking about the origins of modernity, about Rabelais, and the fearful theory of banquets, of the feasts of  Pantagruel and Gargantua, and the capacity for the two Rabelaisian  giants to devour large quantities of game, piglets and whole calves.  But the greed and enormous appetite of Gargantua, according to the  French humanist, were a mere metaphor for the hunger of knowledge  that accompanied the birth of modern man. And today, perhaps being  full instead of being hungry characterises our relationship with  knowledge, an abundant and available good (that is apparently easy  to achieve) as we have never seen before in the history of humanity  − and never mind if we often confuse knowledge with information.  Perhaps we must go back further in time, and see if Trimalclone's  dinner, in Satyricon, is not a possible model for the discussions on  food today. The current fustigator of traditions will certainly find  an easy correspondence between vulgarity, vanity, excess and  exhibitionism thrown into ridicule by Petronius and concentrated  into the eccentric dishes of that banquet, and our current situation. However, here the analogy doesn't last long, because it cuts out  some of the most important components of the discussion on food that  exists today: that of slowness (Slow food), of the recuperation of  the relationships with territory and craftsmanship, and the  anti−industrial production of food.

It is not here, therefore, that we must search for the reasons of  the current issue of food as an analytical instrument (and weapon)  for culture and politics. Perhaps the observation on the  simultaneous cultural decline of the discourse on fashion and the  rising of the discourse of food is not as extemporaneous as it may  have seemed at a first glance, and hides a parallel that deserves to  be dealt with more deeply. There are certainly economical  considerations that can have a certain importance (the difficulties  − exasperated by the current crisis − of the entire fashion industry,  a difficulty that the food industry has suffered to a much lesser  extent for obvious reasons), but this is a factor that in my opinion  must not be viewed too economically. It's likely that the influence  of the production components last longer and deals with new and lasting global characteristics of the production model, more than in  similar situations.

Fashion began to be introduced into the cultural world very early  during the 20th century, but the process took off between the 50's  and 60's, and the Roland Barthes book (The Fashion System, 1967),  represented this rising moment. In the 80's the process became  almost sanctified, but the roots were there. Let's ask ourselves why  fashion had this role in that cultural, social and political  panorama, why fashion became fashionable in structuralist culture  (and sometimes in post−structuralist culture). The 50's and 60's  were the climax (but in hindsight, could also be the beginning of  the downfall) of classic capitalism, of fordist capitalism, of  matter and material capitalism. What mattered (as in the 19th  century, of course, but on a much greater scale) were coal and  steel, rock and cement, heavy chemicals. There was a common culture  and viewpoint for lighter and more flexible materials, like plastic;  but it was always matter. Energy, and immaterial products, existed already, but were on the side, and the instruments were the way to  guide production and distribution of material merchandise. Sometimes  they were needed to rebalance a situation that relied principally on  materiality and heaviness.

Culture had already taken on that role − perhaps it had always had  it. But traditional culture − humanist or scientific − was too  elitist: too "heavy" (metaphorically, but still too heavy) for  newsmagazines. Other counterweights were needed; other cultural  devices that would continue and amplify the fast march toward  communication via images that had begun some decades before in the  second half of the 19th century, first with illustrated magazines  and then with cinema. This device was television, with its  electromagnetic image, an image that was "immaterial" compared to  the chemical image of photography and cinema. It was always matter  upon final analysis, but this time there was no tangible trace of  the world on film, there were no silver rooms or emulsions that gave  a certain consistency to the image. There was just an electronic device that bombarded a cathode tube from the inside and recreated  faces and streets, objects and landscapes, on its surface. It's a  paradox that these images which do not exist, which have a reference  but not a material trace on a physical support, soon became the  greatest guarantee for the reality of bodies, of images and events  of which they assume to be the faithful mirror. As opposed to the  big cinematic screen, immersed in a dark room and therefore creator  of an almost magical rapport with distant and magnificent faces of  the actors, the little cathode screen was a window onto the real world, which dramatised and gave comic relief from "life", without  being pretentious and without wanting to have the symbolic hold (and  therefore ambiguous, potentially false, almost dream−like) of  cinema.

Television was (and in some respects still is) a primary element of  immateriality − or lightness − when compared to the heavy,  hyper−organised, massified world of the fordist society. But  capitalism of long−lasting goods of consumption needed other  mediations between the world of goods and that of imagination, which  were already interacting but not yet interlaced and fatally united  as they are today. Industrial design already existed, as did object  design, but this design was too close to the merchandise and too  pervasive, it bestowed merchandise with a cloak of elegance or it  bathed them in an aura of unreality. Design declared the difference  inside the single piece of merchandise, but did not function enough  as an element of general differentiation: it was too concrete,  because it was presented with the object, and too abstract, because  it was a general model (ideological and mystified most of the time)  of the creative process. A single piece of merchandise was needed, a  single productive sector, that symbolically created that  "sensitively hyper−sensitive" character (to say it like Marx) of  merchandise in general. That single piece of merchandise became  items of clothing − their mystical character, their "metaphysical  subtleness", their "theological whims", became fashion.

Clothes had a defined function, answering a primary need, but could  also appear (as an illusion!) to be a symbol of the superfluous.  They needed productive power, but seemed (especially luxury items)  to escape the machines − recreating nostalgia of a world of  craftsmen, of hand−made products. Naturally that was not the case.  Fashion becomes a cultural phenomenon when it ceases to be  fashionable, or rather when it escapes the imperatives of classical  haute−couture, when great designers start to think about  prêt−á−porter − all things that are known, have been analysed, said  and repeated. The essential aspect that must be observed, I believe,  is that in those years fashion was a "cultural cover" of the  productive system because it was a sufficiently hybrid sector: it  was an industry but it evoked craftsmanship, it leaned toward mass production but it seemed to be a part of "creativity". Its function  was parallel and complementary to that of design. It started from  above (high fashion) and reached the bottom ("elegant" clothing of  department stores), whereas design followed the opposite path. If we  think about the streamlining of the 30's, of those objects (like  William Gibson says) that "seem to come out of a wind tunnel", and a  designer like Raymond Loewy, who began with pencil sharpeners that  looked like spaceships and ended up with the S−1 locomotive that  looked like a schizophrenic radiator. It was not yet the era of Philip Stark and Stefano Giovannoni, where designers became stars  with an orange−juicer shaped like a spider that can't even juice a  cherry. Until the 50's and 60's the fancy was just to get experience:  the designer can begin with furniture, but has not made it until he/she  designs a washing−machine, or even better, a locomotive.

However, at the end of the 70's, and during the 80's, the capitalist  system changes shape, and perhaps something else too. The production  system of merchandise is overturned, and with it the world is turned  upside down for the umpteenth time − capitalism has always done this,  it's its job, to turn the world upside down, put the head in the  place of the feet and the feet in the place of the head, and keep  doing it, but with the head and feet that each time change shape,  and no one recognises them anymore. In the course of 10, 15 years,  the traditionally important sectors for capitalism, for production  activity, are no longer sectors where long−lasting goods are  produced, nice heavy things (that naturally always last less, but  this is obvious), are no longer cars, or locomotives. All these are  still produced, obviously, but they are not at the heart of the system, it is no longer the sector where there is more profit to be  made, it does not give rhythm or dictate the agenda to all the other  productive compartments. The new merchandise, those that count the  most, guarantee a greater added value and rise at an accelerating  rate, and bring with them all the other merchandise, are now  immaterial goods. The capitalism of knowledge has arrived, and the  most contested merchandise, the most precious, the most needed, is  the most immaterial that there is: the linguistic, imaginative,  relational capacities of human beings.

Capitalism manages to get its hands and claws on our most intimate  sphere, on what each one of us retains to be most personal, most  creative, light and even fun, in other words, immaterial.  Cognitive−relational Capitalism begins. The production activity  rapidly colonises a territory that up until that point had been  spared (in certain respects) from the process of valorisation, that  which was the typical and uncontaminated reign of the intellectual.  From one moment to the next the intellectual (and every human being  when frequenting the territories of culture − be it high or low,  refined or popular) finds his or herself deprived of that which was  a reserve: besieged, threatened, but not yet conquered. Ok, this world sucks, work is alienating, society is oppressive, but I can  still walk, go to the movies, read a book, choose a dress, talk to  friends, think about stuff, write a book. In all this there is a  dimension that, in part, is untouchable by the valorisation process.

This is no longer the case. Today we are at work for the global  capital, whether we like it or not, whether we know it or not, 24  hours a day, we are working for the global capital even when we  criticise it, even when we insult it, even when we try to  deconstruct its mechanisms, in certain ways, because capital learned  to gain profit from our relational activities, from our linguistic  capabilities, from our affections. This does not mean that  capitalism is invincible, that the sphere of value has eaten us  whole, because the complete symbolic transparency − the dream of  capital − is structurally unrealistic, because the excess of the  world on language is something that no capital can repair; this  excess and this world reserve, this infinite resource of possibility,  can always be relied on to deconstructed and reconstruct language,  to escape the bite of valorisation. Much invention is needed; new  roads must be walked on − paths of theory and practice. All this  cannot be done as it was done 20, 30 or 40 years ago.

It must be said that the first to discover these new territories of  conflict were women, in the USA but mostly in Europe, and quite a  bit in advance, that is between the 60's and the 70's of the 1900's.  Feminism, it's true, at the start created a whirlwind, mostly in the  rebellious and antagonistic movements where it was created, rather  than on a greater social scale, but it had a great value, first of  all in indicating the primary ambition of theoretical and practical  action in the general symbolic dimension, and not just on a tighter  "social" and political scale, but it placed the issue of the body  into the argument, proposing a political stance on bodies. It was  feminism and feminists that saw that the immaterial was becoming the  new territory for the hunt of capital, and that the conflict between  those who have the means for production and those who don't and live  on their work grew extensively, moving onto territories that  traditionally seemed to be outside of this conflict.

In a situation where the cultural field loses its traditional  autonomy and becomes a moment of economical, social and symbolic  conflict, as it is inside the process of valorisation, it's  understandable, I believe, that this culture tries to find a weight,  a materiality, not to refuse the new virtual territory, but to move  inside it maintaining a link to more secure dimensions. What is more  important, more material, more basic, what determines behaviour and  thought processes more than food?

It is for this reason that food becomes now the "cultural object",  or one of the new and more important cultural objects, that can be  analysed, dissected and on which can be created new conflicts.

I would say that the most important political valence of Slow Food  is in this, in the fact that capitalism is literally eating our thought−processes, our ideas, our language, and so we must try to  resist, or move the conflict, the counter−position, the deconstruction, onto other territories: for example the way in which  we eat, we feed. It's true that the existence determines the essence,  that our stomach determines the chemical, biochemical and  electromagnetic secretions of our brain as well.

Here we can, if we can, better construct the conditions for lucidity,  understanding, analysis, inventiveness, to face the territories  where capitalism of knowledge, semio−capitalism, challenges us to  build our lives every day. "Make your life a work of art", the  historical avant−garde said more than a century ago. Make you table  a work of art, we could repeat today − not, obviously in the banal  sense of the grandmother's doily, and not in the way in which the  Nouvelle Cuisine of Bocuse and Marchesi did 20 years ago (  mystifying but also denouncing a problem and opening a territory).  It wasn't that, it wasn't the décor of food and the table, it was  not the size of the food, it was not even the cuisine du marchè, the  freshness of the ingredients etc.: it was everything around all this,  which expresses, in a confused way, a revival of "naturalness", or relaxation, of slowness. Not just the "working with slowness" of  1977, but eating slowly, feeding slowly, respecting and giving value  to one of the most laborious biochemical processes that we have as  living beings, or as mammals at least, and that is digestion. We are  not oxen or cows, but we should learn to ruminate a little, just  like the medieval monks who digested while reading, or meditating or  reciting the bible, elevating his spirit in the hour of digestion,  so today in some way the adept of natural cuisine and slow food  recuperates a connection between more basic and material functions  and the more elaborate and immaterial ones of the body.

It sees to me that food had become a central cultural object in the  era of knowledge's capitalism because it is the most important  counterbalance that can be found in the de−materialisation of  productive processes, in the encompassment of thought−processes  inside capitalist valorisation processes.

Obvoiusly there are other factors, and I don't want to underestimate  them: there's the acute, strong, and in some people's opinion  scandalous presence of immigrants, of new bands of poverty that make  up (as was for the USA between the 19th and 20th century) an  irreplaceable economical resource, and in this sense they are  welcomed by our entrepreneurs, who are not sensitive to the  conditions in which these immigrants are forced to supply their work  force. We are condemning them, oppressing them, marginalising them  in a way that perhaps is not just more cruel, but also more subtle  than the one American capitalism exerted, one or two centuries ago,  with the successive waves of European immigrants. Now, as had already happened in the USA, in the case of African immigrants, of  Latin Americans, Eastern Europeans, and the close Middle East and  Orient, food is a form of cultural identity for them and a  contribution to cultural hybridisation (and therefore enrichment)  for us. Is it for this reason that one of the most virulent and  xenophobe parties of this new Italian right wing government, the  Lega Nord, gets angry and picks on the producers and vendors of  kebab?

But the arrival of kebab, a food that has its origin in the middle  east in many variations, which is invading the streets of Milan and  Rome, of Florence and Bari, as it has already in Paris, London and  Berlin, is one of the most relevant factors of the mutation of food  habits of Italians and autochthonous Europeans − as well a fortunate  instrument for survival for some (a very few, unfortunately) of them.  It shows (as the Italian pizza is showing across the globe) not just  how much food is a cultural crossroads, but also how its ethnicity  and its roots in tradition are not incompatible with its  internationalisation. It seems in fact that the more food's  ethnicity is strong, the more grows its capacity to spread all over  the world, to show itself as an alternative to local food, as a  functional instrument of integration and mutation of autochthonous  food traditions.

In conclusion, I would say that on the one hand food marks, in some  way, the victory of the material over the immaterial, and marks a  rebalancing of values, of weights, of strategies of activity and  human behaviour in a situation where the immaterial often risks  making us forget our body. On the other hand food, peacefully but  irresistibly, reminds us that our body continues to be a privileged  instrument of our thoughts, even of the most noble (or vile) things  that a human being can produce.

 

BACK

 

Dissapore

 

Beggar's Food

by Franca Formenti.

 

a daily public space and territory for conflict.

 

 

 

Since the beginning of "ready made" culture, the sense of artistic flair has primarily been built on two coordinates: the intention of the artist, who recognises their work as being "art", and an exhibition space recognized as pertaining to the "system of art", a gallery, a public space or something else, but still connected to a promoter, a curator, an exhibition sponsor. A subjective act and a "guaranteed" space.

 

 

 

When Christine Hill - who arrived in Germany at the beginning of the 90's - started cleaning the street she lived on at certain times of the day, that were similar but different to those of the council street cleaners, she created a strong twist in those coordinates. Street Art had always been done, there's no need to recall Bansky or Keith Haring; but the fulfilled gesture was generally "institutionally" recognisable as an artistic gesture, like spray paint or drawing, and it all added up in the end. So much so that urban graffiti was a great presence in the art market, once it coined its genre name of "Street Art". Hill, on the other hand, incorporated other activities into the work of the artist that, when taken on as artistic gestures, became extremely strong in their visibility. The second hand clothes that she sold on her Volksboutiques explicitly declared the statute of merchandise within the work of art, and at the same time exalted second-hand goods as being dialogic goods with many identities, that were discursive and talked ecologically about recycling and alternative circuits. The richness of culture was assimilated by immersion, used with smart actions as theorized by Certeau, made into a metaphor in order to change register when compared to the dominant order, used tactfully as bricoleuse. The artistic flair was one with the ways of relating to one another. It was an intrinsically performative art.

 

 

 

More than give shape to imaginary realities, this relating art wants to be a way of life and model of action within the existing reality. These are practices that are often correlated to the space-time compression of globalisation, therefore marked with inter-subjective instances and identity conflicts - even if the preeminent need is still a common elaboration of the meaning - between the artists and their audiences: therefore these are "artistic" practices on all levels. Rirkrit Tiravanija, a renowned Thai artist, incarnates this generous ambiguity very well, between the acceptance of consuming oneself as an ephemeral and complete gift to oneself, and the ambition of proposing oneself as an ethic model.

 

Tiravanija works with food and his works are, through a precise aesthetic choice, performances; therefore "liminoid" processes, as Turner would say, actions in progress that modify themselves and the external reality just by being produced.

 

Therefore each exhibition ends on the same night as the opening, where the artist prepares exquisite Thai dumplings, merged with local contingencies, which enrich the dishes with the moods and colours of the hosting culture: a sauce, a typical ingredient, an attention to the taste of those present and a necessary glocal gift. But this giving is in reality within a protected commercial circuit: whether it takes place in a private gallery, or a public space, its artistic "connotation" is guaranteed by curators, experts, gallery owners, collectors, promoters and the vernissage public.

 

 

 

Franca Formenti also works with food, but from a post-situationist point of view. The audience that she targets her performances at are not those that are selected by art, like those of Tiravanija. And on the other hand street action does not leave a permanent trace and cannot be redirected to the symbolic-economical order of the artwork-merchandise as did Street Art. Art without deputed locations, without lasting signs; an art that abolishes every "guaranteed" space and is exhibited as a purely performative risk, because it adopts the unconfined logic of the net: the brainframe of the net. It lives in the flow and stays in the flow. It acts upon consumer desires and practices with a smart "eye", it criticizes the commercial model but not to counter oppose it with that of giving, but rather to unmask its pervasiveness. It insinuates that there is no possibility of escaping the exploitation and profit mindsets, even when they take on the seductiveness of giving, of the gift of food: vitality of negativity, on a conceptual level, 50 years later. With the addition of an awareness that, compared to that time, the medium is the message: this is called "institutional critique" in the language of contemporary critics.

 

Behind Franca Formenti's proposals that can be summarised in Foodpower, like Street Food Escort or Beggar's Food, there is no art institution, no commissioner or curator-mediator-minister. Like every open source networking system it founds a new public space, where knowledge is elaborated and is shared horizontally on the basis of macro-conflictual affiliations. Outside the galleries, the promotion and sharing come about through word-of-mouth, contiguity, with syntactic constrictions. Even the commissioner can be coloured with the fake taste of hacker ethics, founding ulterior levels of narration, ulterior links to conflictuality. That fake that only the net can make possible, in an invention of daily life that mixes the experiences of blogs, technical competences and quality locations for poacher crossings: poachers, as Jenkins would say.

 

For Beggar's Food Formenti went to Dissapore, one of the more authoritative networks dedicated to food. With their complicity she created a project of which dissapore.com pretended to be the entrepreneur, to the point of giving a logo to the artist's initiative, so as to create credibility within the public eye. According to the project a certain number of homeless people were trained in order to create delicious hot dishes they could give away on the street to passers by on cold Winter nights. A gift, on the surface of things. A gift that overturns the common sense and social order, where the homeless person asks for food. But this overturning, which is so visible that it seems to be revolutionary, does not uproot the law of profit. The people continue to be exploited, Formenti's project teaches us, from the moment that the entrepreneurial bet is founded on the right calculation which is begging; the tips for the delicious and appreciated hot soup would not have been as rich if they had been left only to the kindness of heart of a good Samaritan. It was richer than simply begging for money, which is at a pure loss, and made of people who are used to buying, exchanging goods for money. The exchange of food with money is not as bad as taking food from someone who doesn't have any. It's less disturbing. It's better to give lots of money back, if in that way one can fight the embarrassment of an overturned social order. Better to "pay" the beggar for their service rather than recognise the sovereignty connected to the gesture of pure spending. Better to avoid thinking about spending: too disarranging. It is on these social psychological levers that Formenti acts as a picklock. The entrepreneur's profit is guaranteed: the organisation of hunger and the criteria for the distribution of food are businesses of the ruthless world of the laws of the market. And they will remain without food even when they will produce it for the community. A metaphor, a splendid metaphor of what happens in this globalisation. A smart bricoleuse practice and a political-ethic action with a great impact and range, as it takes the daily nature of the public space and the territory of conflict onto the same level through the underlining of actions and mechanisms of fair-trade.

 

Luisa Valeriani

 

BACK

 

Salone del Gusto 2010.

Portrait 3.

Scabin, Piola and dangerous liaisons

 

Scatti di gusto

On this website, Franca Formenti leaves a trace of her research, a purposefully Baroque attempt to give shape to the world of food through sharing, dialogues, interviews or portraits, as in this case.

Franca Formenti is collecting much information that will represent the world of food with its neuroses, tics, distortions and aberrations, but with the lucidity of having the vision of one of the few pretexts for a strong and radical subversion of the codes of schizophrenic and decadent contemporaneity. (V.P.)

 

Perhaps it was the Jet Lag that gave me a different perception of reality but all of a sudden I found myself at Eataly in New York with a tall, slim and graceful lady with never-ending legs next to me. She moved as if she were a board gliding softly over the waves, with the occasional quick movement, but always with the grace of a cheetah.

The girl's face reminds me of Neytiri - the main female character in Avatar - because of her strange but pleasant features but also for her slim but muscular build.

She has the sweetness of a muse but if you have the most remote kind of built-in survival kit you will easily realise that at the slightest false move she could turn around and cut your head off with a sabre-cut just like the protagonist of Kill Bill, perhaps without even making a mess and smiling at you whilst killing you...

 

Seeing her interact with Davide reminds me of a Navi when bound with their Ikran, they ride them without any kind of tension.

 

Piola: 24-10-2010 at 00:30

Davide moves among his collaborators in a tollerent but firm way with the same mastery of an Alpha male wolf marking his territory each time he brushes past you, making you very aware of his ego, which even if overflowing from the brim leaves you with an exquisite sensation of pleasant submission to his whims.

The other women that I see make me think that they are absolutely indispensable, the colleague who appears to be the managing director of a multinational, she sees everything, it's her managerial side, perhaps, that which thinks about all the indispensable and practical things.

 

Then there's Giovanna, with the grace of a host who reminds you of those noble women who open doors for their guests, but anyone could be mistaken and think they found themselves in a drawing room of the Turin elite whereas I have the sensation that I'm in a place where the desire to let loose without taboos is unstoppable and healthy enough to be revealed.

 

Davide's brigade, including the cleaning staff, is serene and efficient, thoroughly trained but without having been scarred with the greyness of authoritarian severity which is typical in hierarchies that are devastated by the capitalism imposed by consumerism and debase any attempt of growth in the workplace.

 

Davide is the leader of the pack, and they know without false pretences that in order to excel they must await his decline, before that they would be risking their own lives, but in the meantime they have the privilege of drinking from an immense source of experience laden with Scabin's extrovert genius.

 

But aside from all that which is more or less what everyone knows, but that I am describing it with my own words, what amazes me is Davide's strength, a strength that I feel has been kept quiet until now, I feel like I'm seeing one of those Stradivarius' which hasn't yet found a musician worthy of playing it because you know, that's indispensable too. I was in harmony with his charisma at Le Grand Fooding when I could see the queue of Milanese women in ecstasy who, excited and wet down to their ankles, lined up in order to get their mix "beaten" by him who, the cunning bastard that he is, would do it in front of them saying: "that's how you do it madam!".

 

And, not satisfied, after having beaten it he would drink directly from the glass and swallow it all in one go.

 

The women who were lucky enough to be in front would not budge and he, like a ruthless pirate screamed for them to go back 300 metres

"Go, go, let the others have a go!"

 

The girl, next to him - because the ability of the Navi is in extricating themselves from entertaining the guests in La Piola, to assist him in New York during Identità Golose (Gourmand Identities) and be his assistant as he "beats" the women's mixtures. A multi-tasking partner, because if she were "disposable" she would not last long with Scabin, or at least I think not.

 

In the end, his life is managed by women, or at least I think so.

Davide oozes eroticism and passion from every pore of his body, everyone knows this but no one says so, at least not out loud, I don't know why but he seems to be the male incarnation of sin.

But I see some limits to this because sometimes too much eroticism is the symptom of a channelled energy which has been channelled through a narrow space, perhaps he would need a bigger "bed" where he could slip into a hypertrophic eroticism and a barefaced and genuine activism, because Davide's beauty lies in his elegant and generous impudence but with short reins, too short for him too really explode.

 

 

Just like having improvised a clandestine restaurant in a location that isn't sinister or hidden but instead is behind one of the most famous restaurants in Italy, as their fellow dinner guests ate in the owner's room paying 200 euros a head or thereabouts, at the back guests were only allowed in upon invitation and with a password and you could get in between 11 in the evening and 3 in the morning, walking into the service rooms, an un-recommendable dive... perhaps this a metaphor for contemporary Italy?

 

Or for life itself that needs contradiction and ambiguity in order to have meaning?

 

The food in Piola was hard, the kind of hard associated with swingers or darkrooms, so that while you're eating you cover your face with sauce, or pieces of warm tripe fall into your cleavage, if you're wearing a revealing top, with the risk of someone going to grab it and put it in your mouth when you least expect it.

 

The "well-to-do" ladies who "suck" their hot and delicious broth from their spoons, with half-closed eyes and in the position one adopts when eating broth, enjoying it with all the rest of the members of that masterpiece.

 

In this orgy of every sin there are men who seem to have come to life out of Mythology, like Bonci, with his massive build but with the added peculiarity of making you understand that he really is wild indeed.

 

Monica tells me that Bonci goes up to the tongue, takes a piece, puts it in his mouth, chews and says: "female, 17 months".

"Gosh" she says. "With one taste you can understand all that".

He takes the plate and with a soft but decisive gesture he puts it on the table, turns around and touches his forehead against hers and says "I know cows very well".

 

 

Monica feels like she's sitting next to an enormous and wild bull, who will pierce her with his horns at the slightest false move... she can feel the hoof grating on the floor and the hot breath coming from his nose...

 

Moreno Cedroni recognises every corner of our hidden psyche with a smile and with the serenity of an ascetic.

 

Bon Noto, he's great too, he's big and tall... he comes into the kitchen, he sniffs around, he asks questions and tastes and ignores you, if you do not introduce yourself he won't even look at you... he's somewhere else!

 

Eggi looks like a character from Pulp Fiction without his camera, I'm afraid that he will suddenly take out a gun and kill us all, eating every last bite before leaving.

 

And many others who stick in my mind like characters that slide out of Mythology and wild creatures of the forest, who then disappear with the first signs of dawn.

 

At a certain point I go out to the gazebo to take some photos of the main dining room in the real restaurant, the great combal.zero, and my glance falls upon the building in front of the windows of the restaurant and I realise at that moment that I'm at the Rivoli Castle, one of the most important contemporary art museums in Italy, the temple of contemporary art... I don't know why but I had forgotten, perhaps because I was taken by La Piola and everything else.

 

I don't know if it's the cold, or the humidity or the lights but it has a kind of spectral look to it, like it's abandoned and in ruins, without a soul or life and that's groaning its last yearnings of life.

 

 

 

I don't know, perhaps I've had too much to drink, it's really late and perceptions are deformed into a fabricated hallucination... or perhaps it's the effect of two opposing sensations, one being vital like that of La Piola and one being stagnant and in decline like the museum which, despite its attempts to encage sensations, does not realise that it has a forge of strong emotions next to it that just needs a coach to give it a concrete and enjoyable shape like the food that it thinks, prepares and offers....

 

 

Things that I saw at the "Forum on Food and Nutrition"

hosted by Barilla

 

Finally the 30th of November and 1st of December have arrived, and I am overcome by a morbid sense of curiosity: Barilla has organised the 2nd International Forum on Food and Nutrition, so I rush there. Location: Aula Magna of the Università Bocconi, with a spatial organisation that´s on the verge of being a bit OCD, a little too elitist, aseptic. The Philosopher Marshall Mc Luhan said that Universities should be built in airports. The staff was nice, attentive, normal, aside from the white uniform which reminds me of a mix between the employees of an artificial insemination lab and the members of a Communion and Liberation meeting. I don´t see any super-bionic-buffed Abercrombie style hostesses which seems to be a kind of bluff seeing the current American fight against obesity, and here there are a few size 48´s walking around.

 

Oh come on, Mulino Bianco has some of this very perfect mania, "dove c´è Barilla c´e casa" (where there´s Barilla, there´s a home): If only!

 

There is a queue of journalists who look more like well-equipped fashionistas in cocktail dresses raised upon 15cm stilts, waiting to interview "the" Guido (Barilla).

 

During the first day I walk around the various workshops where a couple of speakers attract my attention. Claude Fischler, Research Director at the CNRS, the agency for National French Research, exposes the various ways of enjoying a dish: whereas the French sit at the tables during lunchtime, the English don´t. He says that if a man eats lunch standing up in his mind he registers that he has not eaten. When he goes home, and his wife asks whether he has eaten something, he will say no.

 

It´s deeply biased to want to deny a transgressive part of one´s life, like when a partner consumes "something else" outside of their couple, and then denies it, they deny it to themselves. Perhaps it is this aspect that the Barilla communication department should concentrate on, instead of insisting on the image of the "uncontaminated", happy family, sat around the table without a shadow or a stain. Often, eating standing up and quickly, like doing "something else standing up and quickly", can be a good thing. Eating while standing up does not mean that one doesn´t eat well. That´s what street food is, and it seems to me that this is increasingly successful, to the point where chefs are turning their skills to the use of "standing up" food, such as the Le Grand Fooding in Milan.

 

According to Prof. Antonella Carù, who works in the marketing/communications department in Barilla, the problem is not the lack of information but the lack of skills in manipulating the materials, in other words the women of today no longer know how to cook. She remembers one of the successes of the Barilla communication department, the "Nel mulino che vorrei" (In the mill that I would like) campaign, which invited the users to send proposals, in turn stimulating them to take part in the participatory nature of this Forum, open to "common" society, just as the internet is. Unfortunately the theories of the marketing team are still to abstract because among the speakers, represented by various people, there are no cooks.

 

I see two of the Barilla brothers.

 

Guido, refined and most of all the head of the family, who in the midst of the controversy on the rise in wheat prices, puts himself on the line with the courage of a lion and creates the Centre for Food with the objective of putting two contradicting lines of thought that are perpetually at war aside one another. He does this with the wisdom of he who knows that conflict or running away from criticism gets you nowhere. His passion for philosophy can be perceived in the way that he poses himself and relates to others, he seems to have just come out of a Tibetan monastery, his intellectual beauty enchants and seduces more than his way of thinking, and together they are disarming. The next day his wife is with him, beautiful, natural, she kind of looks like Pocahontas.

 

Paolo Barilla, an ex-Formula 3 pilot, could be largely associated with the advance of Street Food, eating while standing up, quickly, but without losing the joy of doing so. He´s indispensable despite being less visible and I have the impression that he represents that vein of recklessness that, if lacking, would make the company dead boring, because it would be too self-referential. In other words, you would build a house with Guido but you would run away from home with Paolo every now and again, so that you wouldn´t end up burning your house down.

 

I´m at the presentation with the mayor Letizia Moratti: which didn´t happen. That´s a shame, because food will be at the core of the Milanese Expo in 2015. The next day I see her sister-in-law Milly, who defines herself without hesitation as an environmental activist who is very interested in the damage caused by GM foods. She fascinates me as in her position she cannot make decisions lightly, she´s not Carlo Petrini´s wife (from Slow Food) or Jeremy Rifkin´s, who is an economist and guru of renewable energy, but she is the wife of Massimo Moratti, who in real life, aside from his passion for football, co-owns one of the largest refineries in the Mediterranean with his brother. Many people criticise her for this double identity: I admire her, because as Rifkin says, we live in the oil-era and therefore "we are all in the same boat". She has had 5 children with the enemy and is still with him, she´s amazing!

 

Milly wrote the introduction of chef Davide Oldani´s book, she is acquainted with Carlo Petrini and is at the Forum to get to know some of the speakers.

 

Carlo Petrini gets on stage, he´s the true star, he´s been going strong for many years now. But there could be many objections to his discourse, even if his ideas are appreciable, and I am definitely on the side of those against OG foods, but I remain fixed on the idea that the discussion platform created by Barilla is of great value, it will take many years to realise this, today society is too targeted by many denigrators. On the other hand, Petrini and his Salone del Gusto is not exactly your grandma´s homemade pasta. To make money there´s a few bugs there too.

 

The stars of today are those who make it without having many resources, like Oscar Farinetti with his Eataly, he´s a kind of contemporary icon, less value is given to those who can boast a great-great grandfather who in 1877 opened a bakery which then became a multinational company. Between the two, I think that Petrini will adapt to the other, and not the other way around. Even if he´s more fascinating, well of course, that goes without saying!

 

The killer industrial, like some people call Guido Barilla, who gives you a voice and mixes with the common crowd even during the buffet (they had to do a live streaming there too), with Carlo Petrini, the slow revolutionary, free-range, who is applauded first, and who, at a certain point, with hat and coat in hand makes a getaway, he must have been busy! I think Barilla is used to negotiating, being the father of 5 kids, which is an irreplaceable training to face any kind of company.

 

I would organise the third Forum in a non-location, in order to make it into a location because it is in the becoming that one changes ones perspective of the present.

 

Yes, like an airport, where I would put 20 unknown chefs from all cultures at the buffet who will be busy cooking, (or this could be at the Identità Golose (Gourmand Identities) conference, and then the buffet should be called Identità Affamate (Starving Identities)).

 

Airports are the new frontiers of migrants who escape from hunger, from war, where the use of a meal you can eat while standing up makes sense. That meal that we eat to then go and deny it.

 

BACK

 

STREET FOOD ESCORT

 

FOODPOWER presents a worldwide exclusive during the Interior Design Week.

 

STREET FOOD ESCORT

In the newspapers and on blogs all you hear about is food.

 

FOOD FOOD FOOD

From the criticism of Ferran Adrià and his pupil Massimo Bottura on molecular cuisine, saying they use substances that are toxic to the body, which have been shown on prime time... To the Slow Food philosophy and Oscar Farinetti´s Eataly, that distribute a culture about good food, that is correct and in season, to Obama´s wife who decided to create an allotment in the gardens of the White House by following Petrini from Slow Food´s advice. The latest rules on the consumption of food on the streets of Lombardy.

Ferran becomes a sort of FOODPUSHER because his food is altered, modified, destructured and the more they attack him the more fascinating he becomes. Because we live in a society where it is normal to take substances, from anti-depressants to chemical drugs, what can be more fascinating than altered food from a chef who sprays something in your mouth before he lets you taste his food? A subtle charm, based on something that enters into you, modifying your perception of taste or discovery.

The more we ruin ourselves with junk food, the more I look for excellence and the good and genuine, the right food, as if it were a kind of palate fitness, confirming the schizophrenia of the society in which we live.

 

FOODPOWER

 

Will have a STREET FOOD ESCORT who will distribute food on the streets, inviting passers-by to taste it: an experiment to understand how an individual accepts candy from a stranger, interacting with her, and how important the fruition of food is right now, and why, especially in this day and age where fear and anxiety reign unperturbed over Milan.

 

What FOODPOWER will try to x-ray is a documentation of how food is increasingly a protagonist in our era of new cyborgs that give up their taste-buds to a world that is increasingly digital, virtual and lonely, but still connected to a decadent and evermore dark reality. The gesture of putting something in your mouth, sucking, biting, licking, swallowing, in order to experience the food that crosses our organism and unleashes pleasant and healthy effects like Eataly food, or on the contrary the doubt that the food that is altered or toxic, manipulated but still attractive and irresistible as the figures on an attempt to book a table for dinner at Ferran´s restaurant suggest, which states that they have two million requests per year at the El Bulli, the new icon of the third Millennium, someone who puts a new substance in your mouth that is manipulated food... a metaphor for revisited fellatio, to then go to the forbiddance of eating in a certain place, bypassing the fact that the law may be or not be democratic, but concentrating on the sociological meaning that the possibility of eating becomes illegal and therefore has more significance and charm...

The craft shop that becomes a sort of Coffee Shop, you can eat inside, but not outside :-)

will we be high as we exit these places of perdition?

 

In Stanislao Porzio´s book "Street Food", he tells of how there´s a different story about street food then there is about fast food, that street food tells of people and not time - procedures - methods.

 

And so a world behind closed doors unfolds....

 

Concept FOODPOWER Franca Formenti

FOODPUSHER :Anure Babatawalagamage

STREET FOOD ESCORT : Emanuela Suanno

WINEPUSHER: Dan Lerner

 

http://www.foodpower.it

 

BACK

 

Concept

 

The objective of FOODPOWER is to give food its irreplaceable power back - a power which is often taken for granted - but most of all to induce the public to think about the "new" limelight which food is destined to step into. In order to fully understand this theme, these key issues must first be considered: the rise in oil prices and the request for bio-fuel, the transformation of market demands caused by the uneven distribution of salaries in different geographical areas of the world, and the ever growing difference in the quality of food between lower classes and the upper classes, who experience food as if it were a luxury and end up idolising famous chefs on the quest for new icons of the third Millennium, chefs who in the near future will perhaps take the place of fashion designers who are now cloned by the reproducibility of the Fashion System.

 

Food and its manipulation have in fact become a "new luxury" for the few elite professionals and spectators, but perhaps by stopping to observe this aspect of exclusivity, one can rediscover the mystery of the most ancient and powerful weapon there is: HUNGER in the most extreme sense, or GLUTTONY as in transgression, that nonetheless tend toward the perverted distortion of many human attitudes. Franca Formenti will try to use the context of the Dueart Gallery in order to guide the public on a journey, which at a first superficial glance could appear to be disarmingly simple, but in actual fact by stopping to observe the undertones, the context itself will be manipulated, thus making the public become a "victim" of the performance itself... and this provocation will be the starting point in order to think about food in a different way.

 

The performance will be accompanied by a video-art installation created by Franca Formenti and Massimiliano Mazzotta. This journey across culinary culture begins with the concept of art and haute cuisine, told through the testimony of Top Chef Ferran Adrià, and continues through the exploration of historical companies such as: Parmigiano Reggiano and San Daniele Ham - where art invades some of their productive spaces in order to reinterpret their products in a completely new way; the faculty of Gastronomical Sciences in Pollenzo - the only existing faculty of its kind in Italy - will explain the importance of consuming seasonal foods; and Ms. Anna, from the Salento area of Italy, will teach a teenager the secrets of the ancient ritual of bread-making.

 

FRANCA FORMENTI

 

FOODPOWER

 

Written texts by Tatiana Bazzichelli and Antonio Caronia

 

Opening 13 September 2008

 

Performance at 19.30

 

with the collaboration of the students of the Comunication Science faculty and the Specialisation in Comunication Science and Techniques faculty of the University of Insubria.

 

 

 

SVisitors are kindly requested to participate on an empty stomach http://www.foodpower.it/

 

Hack the Root! At the root of Foodpower

 

by Tatiana Bazzichelli Food Power.

 

Food Power. Who holds the distributional power of nutritional resources today? Who controls the intellectual and material ownership of new agricultural technologies? What is at the root of the process of the introduction of genetically modified organisms (GM) in the farming sector? To use a term cherished by Gilles Deleuze and Fèlix Guattari (1976), which in this case adapts itself perfectly and metaphorically to the Foodpower performance created by Franca Formenti, we are faced with a crossroads between a rhizomatous concept (from rizo-, meaning root), and an arborescent concept of production and of the economy. Literally, the characteristic of the rhizome is to autonomously develop new plants, even in unfavourable conditions. Metaphorically, the rhizomatous thought is capable of establishing productive connections in any direction: in this way everyone is on the same level and no one can feel authorized to prevail over the others. There are various communication nodes that cannot be controlled or managed by a unique apparatus, because if one is limited, the activity of the others is not automatically blocked, being of the same importance in the communicative structure net. On the other hand, the arboreal structure proceeds hierarchically and lineally, following rigid and dualistic binary categories. The dialectic between arborescent and rhizomatous thought can be applied to the debate on copyright and copyleft, between the open and closed fluxes of information, between free software and patents on ingenious products protected by copyright. In the concept of free software, dear to those who identify with the attitude and ethics of hackers, there is a political view of the use of technology as a vehicle toward freedom, thorough the possibility to exchange, manipulate, modify and distribute a product/idea without restrictions. A technological rhizome that opens up to a collective of individuals who make the exchange and collaboration on the net their principle logic. On the contrary, the software protected by copyright do not allow access to the source codes in order to modify them and distribute them freely, thus remaining in the hands of the few who hold their monopoly. This dynamic can be adapted perfectly to the debate inherent in the production of GM crops and the problem in the balance of power between developed countries and developing countries. On the one hand, as the supporters of GM research claim, such production has the benefit of filling the food void for many poor countries, allowing for a more controlled farming process; on the other hand, there is a risk that it will heavily influence the weaker and critical agricultural economies, the result being the colonisation of food production, the weakening of the local agricultural economy and the generation of potential risks for the environment in rural areas, most of all in developing countries. Like the patented software, the GM plants are not freely reproducible, and force the producers to keep buying the seeds each year. The big companies who produce the "source codes" of agricultural products, like Roundup Ready and Monsanto, TBA, Bt Corn and Golden Rice, therefore own the power of access, of production and distribution of resources, creating a situation of prolonged debit for small producers. This situation is greatly worsened if one considers that the development of GM crops happens mostly in Argentina, Brasil, South Africa, India and China, where agriculture is a large part of the national economy. Foodpower is a demonstration, on a small scale, of this colonisation of the planet"s resources, of the contract that forces the farmers to keep buying the seeds each year, sold to them by the monopolist companies, and the power relationships between those who have access to the production and maintenance of food and those who instead have to buy, ask or obtain from a subordinate position. In Foodpower, some people have the privilege to access food, have the power to distribute and can decide whether to keep their monopoly of the food resources or open a channel of exchange and interaction with the other active participants of the performance. These people are obliged to interact with the participants who own the monopoly of the food to be able to gain access, and must think of "hacks" in order to cross the limits of the closed food flux. Copyright and copyleft thus find their culinary materialisation. But as in any performance, the reactions in this microcosm can be unexpected, considering that, as Victor Turner teaches us, it is during the "mise-en-sc"ne" that the codes and the shared categories of a certain society are rewritten, reshaped and modified. Active situations that can potentially free themselves from the concept of code and their own category in order to become experimentation and improvisation. An occasion whereby to hack the logics of Foodpower that characterise our present arborescent society, throwing the participants of the performance into the weave of an interpersonal net capable of feeding itself through the collaboration of a community. A possibility to make power channels open up through food, allowing for the distribution of communication in a horizontal and reticular way. A rhizomous research and development model, without a centre that functions as the privileged transmitter, through a flux of data free from distortions or official mediations.

 

September 2008

 

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Food between actions and words

 

by Antonio Caronia

 

I believe that the best way to comment Franca Formenti"s work Foodpower is to underline how it connects to one of the most common and significant tendencies of contemporary art, that is, it´s linguistic character, in a clear and almost transparent way (we will see whether this sensation is deceiving). Contemporary art, from Duchamp onwards, and more so from Kosuth onwards, is a prevalently conceptual art form: but for human beings, "conceptual art" essentially means linguistic art, because language is the go-between, or rather the basis on which human beings build concepts. But there is a misunderstanding, the art gallery and paint and exhibition buff may comment: visual arts (the name says it all) are made up of images, not words. But the misunderstanding (which is not such a thing, as it has been shown historically) that the visual arts are art forms made of images slowly dissolved during the 1900´s. The story has been told thousands of times, I can only summarise through with key points. Images slowly ceased to be the centre of "visual" arts from the moment (through a long historical process) that they triumphed in other fields that were no longer those of traditional art forms: thanks to the initial technologies of reproduction, followed by the production, of images (from photography to synthetic images), they have become the heart of photography, film, commercial advertising, TV, videogames: all expressive means that inherited their materials and ideas from the visual arts of the past. But when the image began to triumph in those areas, it slowly lost its value and meaning in the traditional art field, so much so that to define contemporary art forms as "visual arts" would probably be misleading. Not because there are no more images in art, but in the sense the image is no longer at the centre of artistic development and processes, because this centre has become a linguistic and relational fabric that certainly interweaves with images, uses them, if they are needed as an instrument of illustration, of explanation, or greater clarity of a substance that is nonetheless linguistic, not to say often openly textual.

 

September 2008