CULINARY LESSONS
THE SPACE OF FOOD
SAC
JOURNAL
4
CONTENTS
4
EDITORIAL
CULINARY LESSONS THE SPACE OF FOOD
8
ESSAY JOHAN BETTUM
INTRODUCTION CULINARY LESSONS
20
CONVERSATION CHARLOTTE BIRNBAUM, DANIEL BIRNBAUM,
SANFORD KWINTER, FABRICE MAZLIAH, TOBIAS REHBERGER,
JAN ÅMAN AND JOHAN BETTUM
CULINARY LESSONS - A CONVERSATION
ABOUT FOOD, ART AND ARCHITECTURE
36
PORTFOLIO ARCHITECTURE AND AESTHETIC PRACTICE
THE FEAST - INGREDIENTS
50
ESSAY CAROLYN STEEL
SITOPIA
SHAPING OUR WORLD THROUGH FOOD
58
ESSAY DANIEL BIRNBAUM
MY EYE IS A MOUTH
ON DIETER ROTH’s ORAL AESTHETIC
62
ESSAY JOHAN BETTUM
STAGING ZÜRICH - STAGING THE SUBJECT
ON MIKE BOUCHET’s THE ZÜRICH LOAD AND
THE POSSIBILITY OF A POLITICAL SPACE
82
PORTFOLIO
CONVIVIUMEPULUM, VENICE, OCTOBER 2016
96
ESSAY DAVID RUY
THE ANIMAL THAT EATS PICTURES
102
ESSAY CHARLOTTE BIRNBAUM
NINE NOTES ON SUGAR, ART AND THE
DINING TABLE
112
ESSAY KIVI SOTAMAA
FINNJÄVEL A THEATRE OF GASTRONOMY
120
INTRODUCTION
THE AIV MASTER THESIS PRIZE 2015 & 2016
122
AIV MASTER THESIS PRIZE 2015 HONOURABLE MENTION
CHAKKARAT WONGTHIRAWAT
THE GARDEN ARCHIVE
HIGH RESOLUTION DIVERSITY
132
AIV MASTER THESIS PRIZE 2015 HONOURABLE MENTION
SANDRA EBUZOEME
STRANGE WALL
142
AIV PRIZE 2015 HONOURABLE MENTION
NATHAPHON PHANTOUNARAKUL
FRINGE
INSIDE THE FEATURELESS ASYMMETRICAL
BORDERS
152
AIV MASTER THESIS PRIZE 2016
JORGE LUIS CORDERO RUIZ
SOMEWHERE IN ORBIT, 2089
162
AIV MASTER THESIS PRIZE 2016
WONSEOK CHAE
THE FORM OF EXCESS
INHABITING ORNAMENTATION
174
AIV MASTER THESIS PRIZE 2016
KAUSHAMBI MATE
THE WEEKEND
186
PROJECT AND IMAGE CREDITS
188
COLOPHON
EDITORIAL
CULINARY LESSONS
THE SPACE OF FOOD
Over the last few decades, the culinary has emerged with an increasingly central place in our daily lives beyond providing sustenance. It has become an expression of marketable lifestyles, prominently featured in all kinds of publications, and chefs from all over the world are celebrated public personas, appearing as guests on television shows or hosting their own. Their cutting edge culinary practices draw on lessons from the sciences, and their restaurants present guests with extreme holistic, gustatory and aesthetic experiences.
Meanwhile, global culinary trends are kept in balance by a rising interest in local and seasonal produce and traditions. Sustainability and environmental effects weigh in against non-seasonal habits and the exoticism of food from the other side of the world. The less admirable part of the food industry is being examined for its - to say the least - questionable ethical and environmental practices. While starvation spreads in some parts of the world, the same industry and the supermarket chains provide the greatest riches to a few within one of the largest global industries.
Against this background yet mainly because the culinary throughout history is intrinsically linked to architecture and the arts, Culinary Lessons - The Space of Food, the fourth issue of the SAC Journal, explores select aspects of the relationship between these three. Beyond the obvious - that the culinary has been a motif in the arts since time immemorial and that architecture always has included spaces for storing, making and consuming food - architecture and art have come to entertain an intense and sometimes far-reaching fascination with food and the culinary. This fascination unfolds from historical precursors along materialist, aesthetic and social trajectories in recognition of how powerfully food and the culinary penetrate not only our lives but the contexts that enable and deliver the most rudimentary but also the most sophisticated human experience.
Culinary Lessons commenced mid-October 2015 as a pro-
gramme in Städelschule’s Master Thesis Studio, Architecture
and Aesthetic Practice, which is led by Johan Bettum and Dan-
iel Birnbaum. Two years later, in early December 2017, it end-
ed. By then, a series of public events - most of them conver-
sations hosted with participating experts from various fields
- and a yearlong academic endeavour with a group of students had successfully been completed. Students and guests had been in extended conversations, prepared, served and enjoyed food and drink on many occasions, and participated in culinary performances. Two of these events are documented herein, one in the form of text, the other as a portfolio of pictures.
In the following Introduction - Culinary Lessons, the relationship between the culinary, architecture and art is further briefly elaborated and the different parts of the overall programme, which was conducted by Städelschule Architecture Class and hosted in different locations, introduced.
The relationship between the culinary, art and architecture was additionally expounded on with the help of experts in a public conversation hosted in Venice in spring 2016. The event took place within Goethe-Institut’s programme, Performing Architecture, and on the fringe of the Venice Architecture Biennale’s opening. The culinary historian Charlotte Birnbaum opened the event with a humorous presentation on sugar as material for creative work in the history of the culinary, architecture and art. She went on to account for the work of Marie-Antoine Carême, ‘the genius of classic French cuisine,’ past extravagant feasts, and the extreme positions on food held by the Futurist Filippo Marinetti and the Surrealist Salvador Dali. Her presentation suggested that an absolute distinction between the disciplines is not always obvious. Her presentation is included in the middle this issue in the form of an essay, Nine Notes on Sugar, Art and the Dining Table.
Charlotte Birnbaum’s presentation was a perfect introduction to the subsequent conversation in Venice where she, the architectural theorist Sanford Kwinter, the dancer and choreographer Fabrice Mazliah, the artist Tobias Rehberger, and the curator, writer and urban activist Jan Åman met with Daniel Birnbaum and Johan Bettum to elaborate on the theme. The transcript, Culinary Lessons - A Conversation About Food, Art and Architecture, witnesses both the profound, historical relations between these disciplines as much as the productive provocations that food can lend architecture and art - or, in the words of Kwinter: ‘… food is simply going back to the beginning … to the practice … to re-pattern our science, our art, our design - as a practice.’
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The introductory part of Culinary Lessons - The Space of Food ends with a picture portfolio that presents digital and analogue excerpts from students’ experiments with ingredients within the design studio, The Feast, which was the yearlong, experimental odysseys they understook in Architecture and Aesthetic Practice.
The students’ experiments centred on experimental, material transformations of ingredients for a feast hosted in Städelschule early 2016. Meanwhile, with Sitopia - Shaping Our World Through Food, the architect and writer Carolyn Steel situates food at the heart of an astounding history and an overwhelming nexus of political, cultural and economical forces in relation to urban morphology and urban life. Steel’s contribution comes out of her acclaimed book, Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives, and her essay herein helps to place this issue’s thematic concerns within the very large political and economical framework that pertains to the future of architecture and cities.
Daniel Birnbaum’s My Eye is a Mouth - On Dieter Roth’s Oral Aesthetic attends to another history, one situated in the arts and Städelschule. Birnbaum discusses the radical art of Dieter Roth as it was presented in 1987 in the inaugural exhibition of Städelschule’s gallery, Portikus. Roth used food, language and literature to break with traditional aesthetics with its prioritisation of the visual. Birnbaum’s short history provides evidence for the power that food has lent art in recent times and in its continued effort to afford us alternative ways of perceiving the self and reality.
Discussing the artist Mike Bouchet’s contribution to Manifesta 11 in 2016, Johan Bettum is everything but brief. He uses Bouchet’s sculpture, The Zürich Load, to explore the possibility of a political space in relationship to individual and collective identities. Bouchet’s sculpture was made using the daily ordure produced by Zürich’s inhabitants, and Bettum attempts to connect this culinary aftermath in art form to a space that sits between those that Steel and Birnbaum respectively address. In the process, he links minute culinary and corporeal sensations to the implied but nonetheless real and vast spatial expanse of food.
Städelschule Architecture Class’ programme, Culinary Lessons, revisited Venice in autumn 2016, once more courtesy of the Goethe-Institut and with the help of Kulturfonds Frankfurt Rhein Main and the City of Frankfurt, Department of Culture. For the occasion Fabrice Mazliah and Johan Bettum teamed up to conceive Conviviumepulum, a culinary performance that hosted more than fifty guests for a Venetian evening meal. The dishes were prepared by pairs guests, and the evening unfolded to the choreography and performance of Mazliah and his colleague, Douglas Bateman. The event is photo-documented with a portfolio herein.
Turning away from the material and gustatory delights of food, the architect David Ruy addresses the way that it is represented through images in his contribution, The Animal That Eats Pictures. Ruy’s interest goes beyond the fashionable imaging of the culinary to situate our ability to imagine and represent things as a unique human capacity traceable from our pre-historic to future survival as a species. Our representation of food, he argues, is at the heart of the culinary and a prime example of humans’ unique capacity to imagine, make and use images to represent reality.
After Charlotte Birnbaum’s essay, which follows Ruy’s, the architect Kivi Sotamaa describes Ateljé Sotamaa’s restaurant, Finnjävel in Helsinki, as a ‘theatre of gastronomy.’ He likens the project to a “Gesamtkunstwerk” where food, architecture and product design were staged in unison. The seductive space that Sotamaa documents, attests to architects’ not-uncommon ambition to link culinary and spatial experience. Yet, Sotamaa’s “theatre” is at once a rousing counterpoint and accompaniment to Ruy’s space of representation.
The last part of this issue presents the projects that earned a prize or honourable mention in SAC’s AIV Master Thesis Prize 2015 and 2016. In 2015 Chakkarat Wongthirawat, Sandra Ebuzoeme, and Nathaphon Phantounarakul earned honourable mentions; in 2016 Jorge Luis Cordero Ruiz, Wonsoek Chae, and Kaushambi Mate shared the prize. Chae and Mate’s respective projects were carried out within The Feast, the programme of Architecture and Aesthetic Practice.
Overleaf: Sayan Isaksson, onion strips, The Feast Prolegomenon, Städelschule (2015)
JOHAN BETTUM
INTRODUCTION
CULINARY LESSONS
Exploring the world of food and the culinary in relation to architecture and the arts is concomitant to taking on the indisputable: food, drink and culinary culture are intimately linked to and embedded in the histories of architecture and the arts. Daily rituals for shelter and sustenance as much as festive occasions celebrating secular traditions, religious figures and events, or political power are inscribed and manifest in buildings, cities, pictures, decorative objects and sculpture since time immemorial. When Gottfried Semper (1803-1879), the German architect and theorist, in 1851 attempted to explain the origins of architecture, one of his four elements was the hearth, the first sign of human settlement.1 Over the flames food was prepared and around it social life unfolded. Pre-historic art depicts scenes of hunting, and since the Renaissance, Mannerist and Baroque periods, food, culinary practice and consumption are commonplace motifs in art. Obvious examples are Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s (1526 or 1527– 1593) use of fruits, vegetables and other edible items to make human portraits, Michelangelo Caravaggio’s still life, Basket of Fruit (1596), or the still-life paintings of the Dutch Golden Age, exemplified by the work of Frans Hals (1582–1666).
The trajectories of this history continue till our age while with the dawn of Modernity it also becomes radically trans-
formed and expanded far beyond the once dominant mode of representation, painting. Latter-day architecture and art engaging with the culinary have not shied away from employing food and decaying consumables as the materiality for the work itself, and - not the least - food and the culinary have been used to expand the social and political footing and reach - particularly in the arts - through performances and direct engagement with the audience.
However, if tenaciously querying and probing the obvi-
ous, untold horizons may arise, beyond which new indefinite
opportunities may lie. This was the motivation behind the
programme, Culinary Lessons, which commenced in Städel-
schule’s Master Thesis Studio, Architecture and Aesthetic
Practice, in autumn 2015. Architecture and Aesthetic Practice
explores architecture in relation to the arts to infuse archi-
tectural design with original and critical ideas and practices.
At this juncture when architecture has lost much of its critical
edge due to its allegiance with technological positivism and
capitalist incentives, the studio relates selectively to the arts in
order to critically engage with and revitalise conceptual, theo-
retical and practical aspects of architectural design. The studio
aspires to radicalise the flow of information, concepts and
procedures that constitute architectural design to engender
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new and experimental reflections on the discipline as much as project proposals.
Hence, Culinary Lessons aimed at exploring culinary history and contemporary culinary practices as a way of tapping into the near infinite material realm that food presents. Central to this interest was the radical transformations of matter that culinary practices administer for carefully choreographed ex- perience. In doing so, the culinary is the most profound, contemporary materialist-aesthetic practice, operating potentially in an unparalleled holistic fashion, linking human consumption and gustatory experience to vast social and spatial contexts. Within these, the individual human body becomes physically connected to near and distant sites of food production and processing, partakes in social rituals and practices, and is inscribed in expansive political-economical systems.
ARCHITECTURE, ART AND THE CULINARY
Architecture’s relation to the culinary is in the most obvious way direct through the role of kitchens and dining areas and central to any proposal for housing and by and by institutional projects. When the Austrian architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky designed the Frankfurt Kitchen in 1926 for
Sayan Isaksson, onion soup and leftovers, The Feast Prolegomenon, Städelschule (2015)
Ernst May’s social housing project New Frankfurt, it was a milestone and anticipated modern, fitted kitchens with its unified solution that were to enable efficiency and be realised at low cost.2 Whereas the social and economical ambitions of the Frankfurt Kitchen largely have been replaced by consumer interests and hyper-marketable products, the heritage lives on with the centrality of the culinary in contemporary architectural design. From IKEA via Boffi and Bulthaup to the displayed machinery of industrial kitchens in restaurants, the heart of culinary life has become the site of consumer lifestyle and a luxury symbol.
With the dawn of Modernity, however, it was art and not
architecture that lent an exploratory and experimental impulse
to everything that concerns food. There is continuity from
Paul Cezanne’s still-lifes with apples from the latter half of
the 19th century to Andy Warhol’s 32 hand-painted canvases
from 1962 depicting Campbell’s soup cans.3 The artists’ shared
motif is food, and the work of both took the pulse of chang-
ing representational opportunities within a disciplinary and
medium-specific art form, painting. Meanwhile, other artists
amongst the Futurists and Surrealists had expanded the inter-
ests in food and gastronomy, reflecting how these movements
were both artistic and social. Two central instances of this with
11
Freitagsküche, Frankfurt, from left: Felix Bröcker, Matthias Schmidt, and SAC student, Alejandro Cruz Nacher
both serious and outrageous propositions and recipes were Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Luigi Colombo’s Manifesto of Futurist Cooking, published in 1930, and Salvador Dali’s surrealist counterpart, Les Dîners de Gala in 1973.
In the culinary world from the 1960s and on, the traditional hegemony of French haute cuisine became challenged by nouvelle cuisine.4 This represented changes both in cooking and the presentation of the food, and these changes have since become world-wide ubiquitous. With these changes, some argue that gastronomy has become an art form in its own right as technology and technical experimentation have become important drivers for avant-garde restaurants.5 Meanwhile, latter-day radical inventions in molecular gastronomy with its near scientific exploration of physical and chemical transformations of ingredients, which is typically followed by extreme plating of the dishes, have since long become influential in gastronomical aesthetics and gustatory experience. Architects and artists’ fascination with these developments are commonplace, yet the 20th century also included very different types of artistic endeavours with food. The latter were motivated by artists’ communal involvement and sometimes premised by overt politics and social ambitions - in part as a form of resistance to the emerging reification of the institutional framing of art and artistic projects.
A recurrent example of this is Gordon Matta-Clark’s work
with food. The American architect-turned-artist contributed in
1971 to the founding of FOOD, an artist-run restaurant in New
York.6 The restaurant emerged in part from ‘a floating dinner
party scene’ populated by artists, and Randy Kennedy, report-
ing on a retrospective of Matter-Clark’s work at the Whitney
Museum of American Art, quotes Mitchell Davis, executive vice
president of the James Beard Foundation, saying ‘that while res-
taurants like FOOD bubbled up from the counterculture, their
influence eventually changed mainstream culture.7 To Kennedy, Matta-Clark’s work exemplify ‘the close but sometimes unsung affinities between the worlds of art and food, [while] also [being] one celebrated example of their coming together, …’
Fabian Lange, left, and SAC student Yara Feghali
THE CULINARY AND STÄDELSCHULE
Cooking has a special place in the Städelschule and its gallery, the Portikus, and Culinary Lessons was conceived of with a clear reference to this history.8 The inception of a quasi-formal programme for cooking at the Städelschule came in 1978 when Peter Kubelka, the Austrian independent filmmaker, artist and theoretician, was appointed professor of the Film Class. In 1980 he re-designated his professorship being for “Film and Cooking as Forms of Art” and became the key figure in establishing the role of food and cooking within the art academy. Besides his work as a teacher, Kubelka’s annual Gasthaus (“Ta-vern”) enjoyed immense popularity and served as a stage for his art and as a place for interdisciplinary encounters. Moreover, the week-long international symposium entitled Gasthof (“Inn”) in 2002, saw artists and architects from different countries present regional specialties to hundreds of guests every evening.
Since Kubelka’s inclusion of food and cooking in the school’s programme, numerous artists - both from the faculty and visitors - have engaged formally and informally with the culinary. Important occasions have been in the exhibition programme of Portikus, founded by the school’s former dean, Kaspar König, who was appointed in 1987 and also immediately opened the school’s cafeteria, the central hub for the institution’s social life.9
In 2001, artist Rirkrit Tiravanija created an event space,
Untitled, 2011 (Demo Station No. 1) in the gallery, and its pro-
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Savinien Caracostea and student Kseniia Leonovich
Sayan Isaksson, left, and Städelschule chef, Hocine Bouhlou at The Feast Prolegomenon
gramme included ‘cooking battles’ between pairs of invited guests. When he returned in company of Pierre Huyghe and Pamela M. Lee with their show Gordon Matta-Clark - In the Belly of Anarchitect in 2004, the trio collaborated with the school’s chef, Hocine Bouhlou, in an attempt to stage a Matta-Clark-experience. The preparations included a workshop with students in the gallery where bread was baked and used to construct a large wall that partitioned the gallery space.10
There have been other formal events revolving around food,11 and the informal occasions are yet more numerous. Hence, Culinary Lessons naturally found its place within this small institution where culinary experiments and food figure centrally as a means to make art endeavours possible while producing vibrant and far-reaching social settings.
PROGRAMME AND EVENTS IN CULINARY LESSONS
Culinary Lessons lasted two years and ended with a workshop and a small exhibition event centring on sugar as a material for sculpting in December 2017. Altogether, the project included three public events comprising of salon-style conversations with invited guests about topics related to architecture, the arts and the culinary; a one-year design programme in the studio, Architecture and Aesthetic Practice, that involved eight students exploring food and culinary topics related to architecture while being guided by a mixed group of experts drawn largely from the culinary field; two dining events hosted by the same students as part of Architecture and Aesthetic Practice’s studio programme; a culinary performance; and, lastly, the aforementioned workshop and exhibition with sugar in which 28 students at SAC participated.
Overall the undertaking comprised of an experimental voyage with aspects of the culinary as the central interest which eventually lent inspiration and general, generic lessons
for architectural design and the arts for everyone who partook. The work in Architecture and Aesthetic Practice is driven by an intense engagement with medium-specific design processes. That means - apart from, for instance, using plating as a compositional procedure in form making - that food and culinary processes will only indirectly lend themselves as lessons for architectural design or, for that matter, art.
Below the separate parts of the programme in Culinary Lessons are briefly accounted for:
The Feast Prolegomenon - From Peelings to Core
Städelschule, Frankfurt, November 12, 2015
Culinary Lessons commenced with the public event, Prolegomenon, which featured a salon style conversation between the founder of the International Culinary Center in New York, Dorothy Cann Hamilton,12 the artist and Städelschule professor Tobias Rehberger, and Daniel Birnbaum. In addition the curator and writer Jan Åman and author, journalist and wine critic Fabian Lange gave respective presentations. The Prolegomenon framed some of the key interests and questions that were to be pursued practically in the studio, Architecture and Aesthetic Practice, as well as in subsequent conversation hosted within Culinary Lessons. This included the history of food and cooking in architecture and the arts, the role of cooking and chefs in the 21st century, and how the respective disciplines engage with innovation and its role in forming the future.
The event concluded with Sayan Isaksson - founder of Esperanto in Stockholm and a Michelin-star chef, serving a soup for participants and guests, while architect, pastry chef and cultural entrepreneur Savinien Caracostea offered pastry made for the occasion. Städelschule students took part in both the preparations and serving of the food.
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INTRODUCTION CULINARY LESSONS
The Feast - The Studio Programme
AAP, Städelschule Architecture Class, 2015-16
During its first year, Culinary Lessons was anchored in the academic, experimental programme of the Master Thesis Studio, Architecture and Aesthetic Practice, which on the occasion was named The Feast. The programme aimed at informing the students’ creative work processes and conceptual planning by shifting the attention to the ephemeral production in the kitchen. By unfolding the traditional elements that constitute a holistic dining experience - food, service, physical setting and atmosphere - and understanding their temporality, The Feast explored a new framework for creating sequenced composition, defining spatial choreography and producing architectural effects. The work sought to liberate formal processes in architectural design from the intrinsic constraints of how a project traditionally is conceived, planned and executed.
The yearlong programme was divided in two parts, coinciding with the two semesters that make up the academic year. The first semester was devoted to exploratory culinary work and accompanying design experiments. The students
spent a large amount of time in various kitchens working with renown chefs and culinary experts, and pursuing lessons from the art of cooking and its radical and innovative transformation of matter into choreographed and carefully orchestrated gustatory and social experiences. The work comprised of basic learning, supported by a series of seminars on various culinary topics interspersed by shorter study trips. This included broad topical interests such as food and ingredients, sequencing of menus, aesthetics of plating, select culinary history, and theories of our relationship to food and how it shapes our lives and the cities we live in.
Each student studied a select ingredient and its transformation relative to specific variables. The first semester culminated with the various experiments being brought together to form the menu for a final dining event with guests (see The Feast, Dining Event, below). In this manner, The Feast abstracted and explored architects’ creative work process and goal oriented planning by shifting the attention to the ephemeral production of a dinner party.
The architectural lesson in this was understood in choreographic, spatial and aesthetic terms, and the second semester saw students attempting to transpose the results of their respective work with culinary and oenology subject matter to propose a critical design intervention that included a culinary function on an existing cultural institution in Frankfurt. These proposals comprised of the students’ respective final design projects.
Freitagsküche - AAP Students Hosting
Frankfurt, January 22, 2016
Freitagsküche is a restaurant in Frankfurt founded by, amongst others, the artist and Städelschule alumnus, Michael Riedel. The restaurant has typically seen artists gather to cook
on a weekly basis. In preparations for the dining event, The Feast, students in Architecture and Aesthetic Practice, guided and helped by professional experts, prepared the full menu and service one evening.
Above, students working at The Feast. Below, Matthias Schmidt with others in the kitchen (2015). Opposite page, above, guests at the Freitagsküche (2016), and below, a scene from The Feast (2016).
The Feast, Dining Event
Städelschule, February 13, 2016
As part of the programme of Städelschule Rundgang, the school’s open-house exhibition, students in the studio, Architecture and Aesthetic Practice, prepared and hosted a dining event for 70 guests, served in three subsequent sittings. The menu of The Feast was based on the students’ culinary experiments and studies during the semester. It consisted of six courses and was based on the eight ingredients that the students respectively had worked with. The carefully choreographed and lavish meal was set with guests seated alone or in varied numbers at very different type of tables - one, for instance, on the floor and another with a couple physically secluded by a wooden frame with a curtain.
The Feast as much as the work during the semester was guided by Fabian Lange, Savinien Caracostea, the chef and writer Felix Bröcker, and the chef Matthias Schmidt who has held two Michelin stars at Villa Merton in Frankfurt.
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INTRODUCTION CULINARY LESSONS
Overleaf: Sayan Isaksson, onions, The Feast Prolegomenon, Städelschule (2015)
Culinary Lessons, Salon Talk
Santa Maria della Misericordia, Cannaregio, Venice, May 29, 2016
This public event, with the same name as the overall programme featured herein, was part of Goethe-Institut’s proprogramme, Performing Architecture, which took place in Venice in parallel with the 15th International Architecture Exhibition