code flow - events
Diaspora Soul Food XVIII:
"Private" National Foods With Multinational Appetites///
A cooking show and installation of appropriated objects, video, sound, photographs and family
pictures by Dimitrina Sevova, in collaboration
with Alain Kessi///
in which the preparation of Tarator, a disputed Balkan speciality claimed by a number of national cultures, a cold summer soup with yoghurt, cucumbers, salt, oil, walnuts, dill and water, is demonstrated. In the Bulgarian recipe, it is essential that Tarator be prepared with true Bulgarian yoghurt, Bacillus Bulgaricus, representing a pure Bulgarian national identity and pride. Accordingly, in the performance, Swiss yoghurt was first colonized with the Bulgarian flag, covering up the Swiss cows on the package. As if by miracle, after this special intervention changing the visual attributes of national representation, it tasted just like the real thing.
Wednesday, 6 April 2005, from 18h///
Your hosts this evening propose for degustation a yogurt-based dish of doubtful origin, a greatly contentious salad, an extra for your sweet tooth, and more, all of them known under the most varied names in all or most of the countries of the Balkans, or even of the Mediterranean basin. All of them national foods with multi-national appetites.
The kitchen has been a constant historical battlefield of social confrontation, whether in terms of the feminist critique of the capitalist division of labor or the formation of national identities via the invention of authentic national foods. In these times however, the cuisine is streamlined, globalized and technicized, smiles at you from all television channels, fills entire shelves in the best bookshops, and the advertizing boards prove to you the importance not so much of your stomach, but of your culinary lifestyle.
When the kitchen has become a field of commercial exchange, you can compile your own menu regardless of sex, age, place of birth and shoe size - if you can pay, that is. Some make their choice according to color, like Sophie Calle, others according to scents, or their political convictions, yet others stick to brand names, or... What is your choice?
See also the documentation on the website of Les Complices*
Here's the beginning of a documentation: autobiographical, all too autobiographical. Adorno to the power of three - not easy to digest...
And one more: through the keyhole: Buñuel's Phantom of Liberty