SAC Journal 4: Culinary Lessons

CULINARY LESSONS THE SPACE OF FOOD

STÄD EL SCH U LE A RCH I T EC T U RE CLASS

CHARLOT TE BIRNBAUM DANIEL BIRNBAUM MIKE BOUCHET SANFORD KWINTER FABRICE MAZLIAH TOBIAS REHBERGER DAVID RUY KIVI SOTAMA A CAROLYN STEEL JAN ÅMAN

SAC JOURNAL

CULINARY LESSONS THE SPACE OF FOOD

SAC JOURNAL 4

CONTENTS

4 EDITORIAL

CULINARY LESSONS THE SPACE OF FOOD

112

ESSAY KIVI SOTAMAA

FINNJÄVEL A THEATRE OF GASTRONOMY

8

120

INTRODUCTION CULINARY LESSONS

THE AIV MASTER THESIS PRIZE 2015 & 2016

ESSAY JOHAN BETTUM

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

INTRODUCTION

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

STAGING ZÜRICH - STAGING THE SUBJECT ON MIKE BOUCHET'S THE ZÜRICH LOAD AND THE POSSIBILITY OF A POLITICAL SPACE

AIV MASTER THESIS PRIZE 2016 WONSEOK CHAE

82

174

CONVIVIUMEPULUM, VENICE, OCTOBER 2016

AIV MASTER THESIS PRIZE 2016 KAUSHAMBI MATE

PORTFOLIO

96 ESSAY DAVID RUY

THE ANIMAL THAT EATS PICTURES

102

ESSAY CHARLOTTE BIRNBAUM

NINE NOTES ON SUGAR, ART AND THE DINING TABLE

THE FORM OF EXCESS INHABITING ORNAMENTATION

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 programme in Städelschule’s Master Thesis Studio, Architecture and Aesthetic Practice, which is led by Johan Bettum and Daniel Birnbaum. Two years later, in early December 2017, it ended. By then, a series of public events - most of them conversations hosted with participating experts from various fields 6

- 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.’

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 BET TUM

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 trans10

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 obvious, untold horizons may arise, beyond which new indefinite opportunities may lie. This was the motivation behind the programme, Culinary Lessons, which commenced in Städelschule’s Master Thesis Studio, Architecture and Aesthetic Practice, in autumn 2015. Architecture and Aesthetic Practice explores architecture in relation to the arts to infuse architectural 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, theoretical and practical aspects of architectural design. The studio aspires to radicalise the flow of information, concepts and procedures that constitute architectural design to engender

Sayan Isaksson, onion soup and leftovers, The Feast Prolegomenon, Städelschule (2015)

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 experience. 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

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 changing representational opportunities within a disciplinary and medium-specific art form, painting. Meanwhile, other artists amongst the Futurists and Surrealists had expanded the interests 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, reporting 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 restaurants like FOOD bubbled up from the counterculture, their 12

Fabian Lange, left, and SAC student Yara Feghali

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, …’

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 (“Tavern”) 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-

INTRODUC TION CULINARY LESSONS

Savinien Caracostea and student Kseniia Leonovich

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

Sayan Isaksson, left, and Städelschule chef, Hocine Bouhlou at The Feast Prolegomenon

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.

13

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.

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).

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.

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.

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 14

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.

INTRODUC TION 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 programme, Performing Architecture, which took place in Venice in parallel with the 15th International Architecture Exhibition at the Venice Biennial. The public talk gathered a local audience to hear the Canadian theorist Sanford Kwinter, the culinary historian Charlotte Birnbaum, the choreographer and dancer Fabrice Mazliah, curator Jan Åman and Städelschule’s Tobias Rehberger, Daniel Birnbaum and Johan Bettum. The event commenced with a presentation by Charlotte Birnbaum about sugar and extraordinary artistic events in culinary history. A highlight in the conversation was Sanford Kwinter explaining the culinary in radical, materialist terms and accounting for what lessons he believes one can have by studying and engaging with food and the culinary.

Performing Architecture was curated by Susanne Traub.

Conviviumepulum, Culinary Performance

Santa Maria della Misericordia, Cannaregio, Venice, October 29, 2016

With Conviviumepulum the programme returned to Venice and the Architecture Biennale as it was once more part of Goethe-Institut’s Performing Architecture. Conviviumepulum was a choreographed cooking and dining event conceived

by Fabrice Mazliah and Johan Bettum. Conviviumepulum - a combinatory of ‘convivium,’ which means ‘living together,’ ‘convivial gathering’ or ’symposium,’ and ‘epulum,’ which means ‘feast’ or ‘banquet’ - paired Venetians with invited guests not from Venice to prepare a set of diverse dishes for a culinary evening. Reflecting the history of Venice, the event merged local and foreign culinary traditions, rule-given and improvised cooking and staging. The dining event comprised a choreographed dinner ritual that problematised food production chains, the question of local resources, human identity and how food shapes our lives in a socio-cultural and historical contexts.

The dishes were served in a performance by Fabrice Mazliah and choreographer and dancer Douglas Bateman who artistically moderated the dinner conversation around the dishes and their preparations.

You Are What You Eat, Salon Talk

Alt Art Space, 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial, Istanbul, November 3, 2016

You Are What You Eat was a public talk and part of the programme in the 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial, curated by the architectural historians and theorists Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley. The two were joined by the renown chef and founder of the Istanbul Food and Beverage Group - which includes the restaurant Mikla, Mehmet Gurs and his colleague and researcher, Tangör Tan. From Frankfurt arrived the American artist Mike Bouchet and Fabrice Mazliah. The conversa18

tion revolved much around questions about individual and collective identity in relation to ingredients, culinary processes and traditions - not the least with reference to Gurs and Tan’s research on these in Anatolia, or Asia Minor, for use in their contemporary gastronomy.

The Architecture of Sugar: The Final Confections

Workshop and Exhibition, Städelschule, November 28 to December 1, 2017

The Architecture of Sugar: The Final Confections was dedicated to the culinary art of sculpting with the sweet, crystal substance, sugar. The workshop took place over four days and saw students in Städelschule Architecture Class work in groups of two or three to experiment with different, exotic varieties of sugar. The workshop drew on century old traditions of sculpting edible wonders with this material. Participants were introduced to the culinary history of sugar; its politics, trade and manufacturing; fashion and the role sugar has had, particularly in France and Italy, at festive events. The goal of the workshop was to engage students in the sugar craft and expand their perspective on this material by creating sculptural objects while using ingredients like sandalwood, saffron, and myrrh to fabricate baroque-inspired confectionary. The four-day event culminated with a small exhibitions of the results produced and an informal conversation with invited guests about the same.

The workshop was led by Charlotte Birnbaum and the architect and specialist in sugar craft, Rolf Stålberg.

INTRODUC TION CULINARY LESSONS

Yeonjoo Oh, Fiorella Gomez Silva, Chawapol Watcharasukarn, Haewook Jeong: Sugar creation

NOTES 1) Gottfried Semper, The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings, translated

by Harry Francis Mallgrave and Wolfgang Herrmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). The three other elements were: roof, wall, and mound.

2) Ernst May’s housing project in Frankfurt saw some 10.000 units built in the late 1920s.

3) Immediately after having completed this series, Warhol turned to photo-silkscreen processes with which he placed his art closely linked to commercial image-making processes for advertisement and market consumption.

4) Whereas the term, nouvelle cuisine, can be dated back to the 1730s and - 40s, its modern usage is attributed to the authors Henri Gault, Christian Millau, and André Gayot when writing on the cooking of Paul Bocuse and others in the late 1960s.

6) The other founders were Carol Goodden and Tina Girouard. The restaurant closed in 1974.

7) Randy Kennedy, When Meals Played the Muse, The New York Times, February 21, 2007. https://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/21/dining/21soho.html, accessed August 21, 2018.

8) The idea to thematise food in AAP’s programme was Daniel Birnbaum’s.

9) Dieter Roth’s opening exhibition in Portikus in 1987 is discussed herein by Daniel Birnbaum.

10) See: http://www.portikus.de/en/exhibitions/127_gordon_matta_clark_in_the_ b e l l y_ o f _ a n a r c h i t e c t ? 9 5 2 7 e 7 7 8 5 a b 8 7 7 9 2 6 b 6 0 0 1 b 6 8 4 d 0 3 f c 4 = d d 2 9 0 8 d f 9 c d b2aad8445e4217500e1e3 11) See, for instance, The Zürich Load herein, 64.

5) For an example in the debate about cooking as art, see: Jonathan Jones, Food can be

12) Dorothy Cann Hamilton (August 25, 1949 – September 16, 2016) was the CEO of

artistic - but it can never be art, The Guardian, May 17, 2007. https://www.theguardian.

the centre which she originally founded as The French Culinary Institute (FCI) in 1984.

com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2007/may/17/foodcanbeartisticbutitca, accessed:

She served as president of the Friends of the USA Pavilion for Expo Milano 2015 and was

August 20, 2018.

recognised as one of the most influential persons within the American culinary world.

19

INTRODUC TION CULINARY LESSONS

Prateek Bajpai, Soonam Lee, Andre Zakhia, Soubhi Baraghit, Suyoung Ko: Sugar creation

CHARLOTTE BIRNBAUM is a culinary historian and the author of numerous books on

FABRICE MAZLIAH is a choreographer and dancer based in Frankfurt. Having previously

food and art. She is a member of the Swedish Academy of Gastronomy and the editor of

worked with the Forsythe Company, he is the co-founder of MAMAZA, exploring

the book series On the Table (Sternberg Press).

problems related to embodied knowledge, our relationship to the environment, objects, atmospheres, and our bodies.

DANIEL BIRNBAUM, philosopher, critic and curator, is the director of the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm and professor at the Städelschule. He was the dean of the

TOBIAS REHBERGER is an internationally renowned artist based in Frankfurt and

Städelschule and director of Portikus from 2001 to 2010 and the director of the 53rd

professor at Städelschule. His work comprises of sculptures, installations, films,

Venice Biennial (2009).

paintings and gardens. He has received numerous prizes, including the Golden Lion award for best artist at the 53rd Venice Biennial (2009).

SANFORD KWINTER is a writer, architectural theorist and co-founder of Zone Books publishers. His work includes influential essays and books: Far from Equilibrium: Essays

JAN ÅMAN is a curator, writer, columnist and urban activist specialising in the meeting

on Technology and Design Culture (Actar Press, 2008) and Requiem for the City at the End

between contemporary art, urban development, food and social phenomena. He is

of the Millennium (Actar Press, 2010). Kwinter is professor at the Angewandte University

based in Stockholm, Sweden.

of Applied Arts, Vienna, and Pratt Institute, New York.

CULINARY LESSONS A CONVERSATION ABOUT FOOD, ART AND ARCHITECTURE On a bright Sunday afternoon in May 2016, in conjunction with the opening of the 15th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice, SAC hosted a group of guests in Chiesa della Misericordia in Cannaregio for a public discussion about the relation between food, art and architecture. SAC’s Daniel Birnbaum and Johan Bettum were joined by the artist Tobias Rehberger, the dancer and choreographer Fabrice Mazliah, the culinary historian Charlotte Birnbaum, the architectural theorist Sanford Kwinter, and the curator, writer, activist and cultural entrepreneur Jan Åman.

The event was part of Goethe-Institut's programme, Performing Architecture, which was curated by Susanne Traub.

The programme aimed at ‘transforming the urban space of Venice into a stage for artistic encounters, visions and explorations … [to] make encounters possible and create fleeting places of exchange, which playfully [would] shift boundaries and challenge habituated forms and patterns of thought. By 22

interacting with other art forms, architecture [would become] a sensory experience and reveal a new social relevance.’

During the course of the intense and also humorous conversation, a wide range of topics were addressed. Amongst other things, the talk suggested that architectural and artistic engagements with the culinary may open the disciplines up to a new form of materialism by, as Sanford Kwinter put it, ‘placing food at the beginning of the sensing of the world.’

Food would offer an expanded, sensitive involvement with everything that surrounds us.

D. Birnbaum: Some of us find the link between art, architecture and food very natural, but it is not actually given that an art academy has a kitchen next to the administrative director’s office as it is at the Städelschule, or that food be taken seriously as an art form and intellectual practice. At the Städelschule, Peter Kubelka, the Austrian film-maker and professor, considered cooking to be the oldest and most important of art forms. He was always teaching food and cooking as part of his art and is still very active. These conjunctions are reminders of different things.

It is good to recall that everything in the culinary world that is happening right now or during the 20th century with avant-guard figures, such as Salvador Dali and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, was not the beginning; there are older things. Recently, there was a large exhibition at the World Fair in Milano, a show about the history of art and gastronomy, Arts and Food curated by Germano Celant. At the centre of things you, Jan, together with Savinien Caracostea, helped curate a section. Celant’s show started not with the Baroque era but rather in early Modernism … Åman: Yes, the World Fair became big with the Crystal Palace in 1851, the showcase for innovation on a cultural, political, and economical level - on all levels of society. We were asked to bring in discussions on culture and politics but also to make real innovation. What is fascinating about contemporary food is that it is the pop culture of today. If one of the super-chefs go to Tokyo, three or four television teams follow every footstep. The super-chefs are the “Picassos” of today and pushed to say something about how they can contribute to improving or saving the world. At the same time, food is interesting as a tool for big transformations. The large food industries and their production cycles have changed since Modernism. On an economic or entrepreneurial level, there are global initiatives with investors from Silicon Valley and other parts of the world,

investing in new companies that can disrupt the hegemony of the food industry. That, of course, affects how we treat cities all over the world; we are trying to bring local production back which means that there is a much closer link to very old knowledge of how to cook. Suddenly we are cooking the whole animal again, but with a knowledge of new technology, entrepreneurship, and innovation. That is a big thing. At the World Fair there were also big discussions between the political leaders on how we can create food and cultural diplomacy. For instance, some of the leaders at the World Fair were investing quite large amounts of money into finding new structures for food production and distribution in different countries in Africa. And I think the most interesting play is how food continues what Marcel Duchamp and other artists did when they took away the idea of the idealised object and looked at the object from a different point of view. I think that is why food is so interesting from a cultural and artistic perspective, and, at the same time, it ties in with a profound potential for political and economic change.

D. Birnbaum: We ought to come back to the idea of food and art and the dematerialisation of the art object - or, perhaps in this context, its edibility. But before we do so: Sanford, you are starting something now at the Pratt Institute in New York, where you try to explore the relation between food and other creative disciplines in an institutional setting. Why do you do this? Do you want to establish gastronomy as a discipline, or do you want to introduce gastronomy as a possibility for something? And what is it with the kitchen and food that interests you from a theoretical or philosophical point of view?

In what way does food relate to matter and materialism that you for decades have been writing about?

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Kwinter: The last question is fascinating for I had almost lost sight of the literal connection between my various interests! My engagement with food was slow and long in developing. Clearly, no one in the design world could have been left indifferent by the experiments that were taking place in the research kitchens since the turn of this century around the so-called “molecular” cuisine projects. One might even say that it had the status of a design revolution. For example, a related idea, that of micro-structure in music, was one of the most important developments of the 20th century aesthetic avant-garde. This set of innovations emerged out of the Second World War when manipulable sound recording devices became available to an intellectually hungry civilian population seeking all forms of radical renewal. The focus of musical structure and organisation changed so much in the 20th century beginning with Schönberg, then finding even more explosive developments when the electronic revolution took place just after the mid-century. Composers like Karl Heinz Stockhausen, who had first access to the new recording and playback equipment that was developed during the Second World War - particularly magnetic tape and electronic processing devices - began to synthesise sounds. They firmly believed that there could be a new type of perception, a new type of sensation, even a new type of being that the human could realise or participate in - a new beginning through which humans could remake themselves by altering and synthetically controlling their perceptual environments. With magnetic tape one could actually design sounds by building them one vibration or cycle at a time; a painstaking process that could take three or four weeks to create a single tone. Yet, this way one would no longer be dependent on naturally resonating instruments nor the limited spectrum of sounds they are capable of producing; one could create a musical experience that was entirely synthetic and which would perhaps open human perception to entirely different aspects of the universe than would be accessible if relying only on the naturalistic experience that was found in traditional musics. So, in more than one way, with what was emerging with molecular cuisine, we began to realise entirely new ways to use the mouth both to sample and to make the world.

So, to answer the question as to why we are doing this now: I am after all an academic, and there is a widely felt belief that education as the dominant enterprise in which humans engage - the entire first third of life and well beyond - is also in crisis. This would seem to require a completely new set of ways of thinking about how knowledge can be found, developed, discovered, and of course transmitted. The idea that the kitchen might replace the traditional laboratory or classroom model suddenly became an interesting one to explore, especially once one gets past the general clichés to ask what might the entirely different social environment of the kitchen, the different relationship to the source and second order materials, establish or lead to? Contemporary thinking about food, as Jan necessarily points out, has to do with thinking about the entire system of the world, which is to say, how we ingest the world.

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Fabrice Mazliah

Charlotte Birnbaum

Jan Åman

CULINARY LESSONS A CONVERSATION ABOUT FOOD, ART AND ARCHITEC TURE

The world, for most of the human and prehuman past, took on meaning and came toward us as food. We ingested it; we drew what we needed from it. Now, as then, we cultivate this relationship because it changes how we come to feel - as when for example, we consume sugar, chocolate, fats or caffeine, etc.

In sum, the project is, through food, to rethink everything, to place food at the beginning of the sensing of the world. For the time being, we do not seek anything more precise than that.

Bettum: That is precise enough! You have spent much time and effort through your written work describing the finer relations in material, scientific and technological systems and how these may affect our being in the world as much as the creative opportunities they may afford. Was there anything in particular that made you turn to food and the culinary arts?

Tobias Rehberger

Sanford Kwinter

Daniel Birnbaum

Kwinter: One inspiration comes from when I was teaching at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design over the last years.

During this time, the chemistry department invited chef Ferran Adria on a multi-year contract to teach a course on The Physics of Soft Matter. Adria was the shaman, one might argue, of soft matter for at least a couple of decades. There was enormous demand to participate in his physics class, and it clearly drew the attention of a few of us in the design school. One might also, almost at random, choose to note how important sugar once was in our world picture, indeed how sweetness and food were at one time and for a long period nearly synonymous.

If one were lucky, one would consume a lot of sugar; one would, as Charlotte tells us,1 even pick one’s teeth and gargle before bed and post-repast with sugar. Sugar also possessed enormous economic and world-shaping importance, a story wonderfully told in Sidney W. Mintz’s Sweetness and Power The Place of Sugar in Modern History (1986). Sugar makes us feel good even when it makes us feel bad later on, yet it was inarguably a substance that provided reliable uplift and elation. Another key moment in my own food study - as I began to imagine how food could become a way of doing philosophy - was Heston Blumenthal’s remarkably concise summary of his decades of experimentation and research and his invention of one of the astonishing cuisines of the world: ‘We eat with our brain.’ There is considerable neurobiological evidence for this assertion.

It is true that eating has always been associated with sensations predominantly limited to the mouth. Yet sometime not even that - consider the broad medicalisation of our food concept in the contemporary and modern eras, especially in the protestant world. It is often all about nutrition, building a good body and robust health. But this too is a peculiar deformation, very remote from what food is about, or has been about. It persists and remains a limiting idea. And yet there are variants and traditions that move to entirely other places, such as the Ayurvadic (Indian) tradition which has a radically different view of the body and the nervous system. This system, among many, understands eating as a direct engagement with the environment, and about a continual modulation or changing of the brain.

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Culinary Lessons in Chiesa della Misericordia, Venice (May 29 , 2016)

D. Birnbaum: So when you mention the chefs, Ferran Adria or Heston Blumenthal, we think of them almost as artists today, and Charlotte has written about the parallelism between the master chef and the genius artist; that they have their kitchen or studio; that they show their work in a gallery or in a restaurant; that they have an audience or they have guests. Tobias, you have worked directly with food and with the institutional structures that have to do with the culinary world. Here in Venice, you did the cafeteria in Giardini for the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009 - formerly known as the Italian Pavilion, for which you won the Golden Lion. Your project is a sculpture and yet also a functioning café. It is a very Baroque kind of structure and an example of an art piece that obviously has to do with people eating, digesting, celebrating, drinking …

Rehberger: I love to eat, but I am also very interested in what is around food. I am interested in the kind of social structures you have, how you behave in a bar at what time because of alcohol, how you eat something at a certain time, or why you would not. For a long time I have wanted to write a book about how to eat things - not just recipes, but how to eat a certain bread, how much oxygen to breathe in, how fast to chew, whether to taste it in the front or the back of the mouth, etc. I founded a food club in Frankfurt where we 26

were not so interested in only having great food, but also food which is not so great, but done by great people. For example, having famous DJs who almost could not cook, but then they would do something and you would eat that. Or, for instance, Miuccia Prada was doing pizzas with mozzarella from her own farm. I believe in the fact - as Sanford was saying - that food is somehow connected to everything, that we eat with our brains, and how we enjoy food comes from the context. In the 1980s I was travelling in Guatemala, and for some reason we could not find something to eat for two days. We arrived at Lago Atitlan, and then we would have to walk another three hours to the next restaurant. They had beans and rice and avocado, and it was probably the best meal I have ever had because I was so hungry. [Laughter] What I am mostly interested in is how these things somehow come together.

D. Birnbaum: Fabrice, you are a choreographer and have been involved with the architecture programme in the Städelschule. You came in not because of your interest in food and gastronomy, but simply because there has always been a dialogue between the Städelschule Architecture Class and other disciplines. There was the world around William Forsythe that we were interested in, and we got to know you, who come out of and is still part of that world. You are a well-known cho-

CULINARY LESSONS A CONVERSATION ABOUT FOOD, ART AND ARCHITEC TURE

Top left: Peter Kubelka cooking in the Städelschule film kitchen for the lecture,Essbare und nichtessbare Mitteilungen (2015). Bottom left: Air of carrot with curdled coconut milk, elBulli (2003)

Top right: Peter Kubelka, Concert and Dinner for Animals and Humans, Städelschule (February 8, 1983). Bottom right: Ferran Adrìa at Harvard University, Loeb Theater (September 7, 2010)

reographer in your own right, and together we had a dialogue between architecture as a spatial practice and the dance world. The year after, we had a similar thing with the music or acoustic world with Heiner Goebbels, the great German artist and composer. And then, as a third chapter in the third year, we try the same dialogue and see what happens when it is the kitchen as a reality or as a metaphor and the world of eating and cooking. And I know that you have also done things that have to do directly with food. Maybe you can reflect a little bit on this?

We generally do not work much with music, but here we had sound and this was very specific. Everything was much more concrete and much more palpable. The main, guiding idea revolved around how you can feel what you are watching, taste what you are hearing, or play with a sense in a different way.

Of course, a lot of people who come to a performance are not able to experience or play with these things, so we had the idea of creating a big dinner event on the main stage totally in the dark. We invited a very good chef to prepare a great many dishes. It was more performative than in a restaurant: the chef had to create a lot of different dishes which had different sounds, or depending on how you ate it, had different smells that engaged one’s relationship to what one ate other than just the look of it. In other words, we tried to subtract the visual to stimulate the other senses. So, the space was pitch black, and you did not know where or with whom you were eating. You just tasted and drank things that came to you. And you learned how to eat - which is also very interesting, and you realised that you needed to touch the food, the wine or what you were drinking in order to understand what you were taking in. Since being deprived of sight, one needed to visualise something somehow, to manufacture an idea, otherwise it would not be complete.

Something else necessarily emerges.

Mazliah: We did a performance, called Zero, a few years ago in Antwerp. It dealt with the idea of the a-functionality of the body, meaning that the body is dissociated from its meaning and activities. It no longer does something for someone anymore. We played with lights and sounds so that everything was detached from everything else. The performance dealt with the idea that the senses are not coordinated anymore, and we tried to trigger the audience into experiencing the performance in various ways. We realised that sight inhibits the audience from experiencing. Of course, when you watch a dance performance, you mostly look at it. You see forms, shapes, organisation, and movement, and you rarely experience the whole thing with other senses, so to say, touch or hearing …

Overleaf: Culinary Lessons in Chiesa della Misericordia, Venice (May 29 , 2016)

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Tobias Rehberger, Was Du liebst, bringt Dich auch zum Weinen, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Biennale di Venezia 2009

Lygia Clark’s proposition Canibalismo. Shown in use, probably in Paris (1973)

Bettum: Sanford, you suggested that food can serve as a way to rethink everything. In Frankfurt, Daniel and I have been leading a group of students in a one-year programme we called The Feast. The students have experimented with food in and outside the kitchen; they have worked with various specialists and fantastic chefs. After one semester, they concluded their work by hosting a feast and choreographed the setting and the evening’s sequential procedure. The event comprised of a culinary, theatrical drama. Afterwards, however, the result poses an enormous challenge, the moment one attempts to take the lesson of this experiment into architecture. An obvious and reductive solution would be to look at parts of the result in compositional terms in the form of plating, the beauty of how food looks on the plate and is served. Yet, we are talking about something beyond the merely visual, another economy where food and everything around it comes together. Sustainability may be part of it; however, it revolves as much around aesthetics in a broader sense and how we are being produced as subjects with respect to intimate as well as distant and formal elements, factors and relations. Against this background, how is it possible to take precise lessons from the culinary?

we learn from the world of food and cooking? When you say, Sanford, that the kitchen may replace the laboratory and it is about rethinking everything, it seems almost like it is more a matter of knowledge, or is it more a scientific problem? Is it knowledge production that we are after, or is it enriching, enlarging, expanding on the idea of what it is to be an artist or an architect? Is there something that we can learn from, for instance, the world of the Futurists, the Futurist Cookbook, which is a technological, optimistic, crazy book? What is this learning that we are trying to claim here?

D. Birnbaum: Yes - if I may interject - this afternoon’s session is called Culinary Lessons, and a lesson is something where you supposedly learn something. What is it actually that 30

Kwinter: This is it precisely! This is a question I knew that I would have to both ask and answer. So, before our inaugural event in New York this spring, I wrote out, in not much more than an hour’s outpouring, sixteen different answers, because …

D. Birnbaum: Answers to this question?

Kwinter: In a buckshot way, yes. I wanted to address it very, very clearly. With a further hour there could well have appeared another sixteen answers, and the question almost by definition could be shown to go on forever, but the answers were all really good! [Laughter] What I mean by that is that the answers were both strange and adequate within a certain framework. What was beautiful about the exercise is that it was like a dance or a tango in the sense that, no sooner do you

CULINARY LESSONS A CONVERSATION ABOUT FOOD, ART AND ARCHITEC TURE

Rivane Neuenschwander, Spell, Portikus, Frankfurt (2001)

ask a simple question, you get an unexpected, even fascinating new answer. Like a conversation that goes on asymptotically.

And it seems to me that in most of the sciences, it does not proceed like that. Once you get your fact, you are done, and you move on. But this is different because it has a conversational structure. I believe - and this is the real impetus behind this project - that the scope and essence here is “environmental.” It has to do with the fact that the very nature of what we need to know today is different. The modalities of knowledge are changing, shifts are taking place. So here are two of the answers I thought of: Number one: Knowledge today follows what the 18th century called the flow processing rather than batch processing model. The best insights today are those that elucidate feedback mechanisms and that acknowledge their inherent endlessness. As soon as a certain level of understanding is achieved, a new set of givens appears. So, in fact, with respect to food - let us recall that we eat, we digest, and then we eat again - it is a different process, not the same thing as closing the book and pushing it away once you have achieved a basic understanding. Food inculcates us in an engagement that is a continuum.

I remember needing to sum the event up quickly to prevent it descending into tangential concerns. In the end I was happy with what I came up with: I said that the food epistemology - the study of knowledge, the food problem - is essentially about learning to pay attention. Much of the inspiration behind this formulation comes from art practice. Indeed, a lot of it came from my experience of the role that food plays in Olafur Eliasson’s factory, the realisation that the reason food is so important in that studio culture is simply because they are interested in understanding how we can become attentive to perception. How we can transform the external world such that it provokes in turn a different set of neurological and cognitive responses in us. It occurred to me that learning to pay attention is something we really do not know how to do because we can never achieve this all at once, as Buddhists and the Zen practitioners tell us. It is necessarily a practice. Now it seems to be that this is among the most significant things going on through culture today. In response to the properly toxic ecology of the digital world, we need to develop “de-sublimated,” “counter-attentional” practices. For me food is simply going back to the beginning, back to the practice to what we all always do, and then re-pattern the rest of what we do - to re-pattern our science, our art, our design - as a practice.

Number two: We had a wild, weird - as is nearly always the case in New York City - question period after our kitchen event.

D. Birnbaum: So, it is some kind of return to very basic things?

31

Kwinter: I believe it is, in all its “alien-ness” … I feel it as a return, for sure, but a return to a pre-modern or even archaic sensory universe.

D. Birnbaum: Eye, nose, mouth. The mouth, as Hegel liked to point out, is the privileged connection between interior and exterior, between subjectivity and the world of objects - the site where nourishment enters the metabolic system and thought, via language, and becomes perceivable by the senses. Of course, the medium for thought is the voice, which is characterised by a unique kind of self-effacement: thoughts enter the world but often evaporate immediately with hardly a trace. I am thinking of some Brazilian artist that prove that sometimes the mouth can take the eye’s position. Would you accept a little Brazilian digression?

Kwinter: Sure, go ahead!

D. Birnbaum: We made a show with Rivane Neuenschwander in Frankfurt.2 It involved snails. Eagerly devouring their environment, the snails drew curious maps - the images have a strong cartographic appearance - while escaping the territory.

The mouth is also significant in Eatable Alphabet, a series of abstract paintings composed of horizontal stripes against the white ground of PVC board. The piece’s title makes the ancient analogy of reading and eating - the prophet Ezekiel eating his roll is just one of many biblical examples - relevant to the understanding of the work. While the different stripes of “edible letters” are visually similar, only the varying colours indicate that different food powders have been used, and the paintings are ordered alphabetically: açafrão, black pepper, colorífico, dill, espinafre, feijão árabe, gergelim, Hähnchen, Indian curry, Jamaican pepper, Kräutersalz, Lorbeer, mustard, noz moscada, orange, pimenta chili, quatre épices, rote beete, semente de papoula, tomate, urucum, vinaigrette, wasabi, xique-xique, yellow corn flour, zattar. This work is certainly experienced with the eyes, but its true significance is graspable only if the absence of the experience of taste is taken into account. Or can the eye also eat? In the context of Brazilian art, the idea of cannibalism is not such a strange starting point for issues of interpretation and the varying aesthetic experience - quite the contrary. ‘Only anthropophagy unites us. Socially. Economically. Philosophically,’ declared the poet Oswald de Andrade in his Manifesto Antropófago (1928), describing the evolution of modern Brazilian culture in terms of the cannibalistic devouring of other cultures. Andrade’s oral metaphor took such hold almost half a century later that artist Hélio Oiticica would define the resistance of Brazilian culture to external influences - its ability to ingest other cultural information instead of succumbing to some international style - as a kind of “super-cannibalism.” And Lygia Clark considers the concept overtly in works such as Cannibalismo (Cannibalism) and Baba Antropofagia (Cannibalistic Slobber; both 1973). ‘I think I have even become a cannibal. I feel like eating everybody around me that I love,’ she once wrote about her projects. The driving force of cannibalistic desire in Clark’s artistic practice and approach to 32

Above and right: Culinary Lessons in Chiesa della Misericordia, Venice (May 29, 2016)

the world becomes less an issue of cultural influence than one of psychic economy.

Bettum: Is this oral obsession still present in today’s Brazilian art?

D. Birnbaum: Without wanting to reduce Neuenschwander’s art to her famous predecessors’ productions or to the modernist discourse of antropofágia, one cannot help but note, given her snails and “edible” letters, the presence of this typically Brazilian theme in her work: forms “eating” each other, continually incorporating, digesting, or assimilating others. Her art is full of containers and vessels, bubbles and receptacles.

Bettum: But what is the significance of this Brazilian hunger art?

D. Birnbaum: Time also eats. After all, Saturn - the Roman god of harvests, known as Kronos in Greece - devoured his own children. And if ingestion is one recurring theme in Neuenschwander’s work, the relentless passage of time is another, and the notion of melancholia is a possible link between them.

In his 1917 essay Mourning and Melancholia, Freud explains the

CULINARY LESSONS A CONVERSATION ABOUT FOOD, ART AND ARCHITEC TURE

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Tobias Rehberger and Rirkrit Tiravanija, Portikus X X X, Kleinmark thalle, Frank fur t (October 10 -1 4 , 2017)

melancholic person’s inability to get over loss as a “cannibalistic” oral fixation. Instead of working through the traumatic loss in a productive way - as does the person who actively mourns - the melancholic internalises the lost object, thus producing an aching inner spatiality of agonising phantasms.

On a symbolic plane, the melancholic “eats” the absent object instead of accepting the loss. This theory, eccentric as it may seem, has been extensively elaborated in psychoanalytic literature, from Karl Abraham’s writings in the 1920s to Julia Kristeva’s 1987 study, Soleil Noir: Dépression et mélancolie.

Bettum: Jan, you and Savinien Caracostea were responsible for an other, very different culinary lesson which ended up being an important issue of one of the leading architecture magazines, Log. Is there a lesson there or is this just eighty different voices or fifty culinary practices and how they somehow intervene into art or architecture? Åman: The editor, Cynthia Davidson, was always asking: What is your theme, what is your take on food? And in the end we had to say that food is perhaps in one sense the last avant-garde that we have. Yet it is very indeterminate, something not yet defined in the sense of an academic discipline in relation to the economy, the city, or traditions within other disciplines. We began with a quote from President de Gaulle on 34

‘how can you govern a country with 246 varieties of cheese?’ and I guess that is really what food for us came down to. I have had a long interest in cooking and food, but it really started when Tobias, a few others and I went down to elBulli3 and had dinner. How many courses were there, 48 or something? [To Tobias] Rehberger: Yeah! It was a lunch, actually … [Laughter] Åman: It was a lunch! To me it was a major culture or art experience in the way that it was not just the food itself, but the way that the courses were combined, going from salt to sweet, different textures and so on, and it became a contemporary symphony in the most unromantic way you could ever think of. We brought Adria to Stockholm shortly after to give a lecture. He talked about everything - about nature, technology, maps, scientific research - and made it physical, saying - as you are, Sanford - ‘rethink everything!’ And I think that is the beauty of it. Currently we are staging this sort of “bad” kitchen in Stockholm in a place that I am developing. We face all kinds of challenges with respect to what it might become, and I relate to what you have told, Sanford. How can we go from the physicality of the food into knowledge, politics, economy, and how things in our social spheres are actually being negotiated and done.

CULINARY LESSONS A CONVERSATION ABOUT FOOD, ART AND ARCHITEC TURE

Kwinter: Chefs everywhere are starting to do exactly that.

Using little electronic devices next to the dish, press the button, integrate the stimulus … [Makes spraying sound] Rehberger: And in a certain way it is very limited, no? I mean, this tired idea that you have five senses, and then you smell, you see, you feel …

Kwinter: But you know, it is actually about the modes of integration that produce a whole new human being. Every human being integrates in a different way. Integrating the senses changes what we know … the German word, ‘Umwelt,’ is often invoked precisely to signal this infinite variation in organism-world possibilities …

Rehberger: No matter, it is like a hundred years old. You know, they just started to do these kind of things in restaurants. However, I think there is so much more to it than just firing the senses: Social structure, projection, ideas that you carry around already. All that has a big influence! It is not just something like: ‘I touch something while I smell something while I feel something in my mouth.’ I find that a bit reductive.

Tobias Rehberger and Rirkrit Tiravanija in Pop Up-Restaurant, Venice, Italy (2013)

D. Birnbaum: I guess the Futurists wanted to turn the kitchen into a kind of technological environment. Is that a big practical joke, or is that something we can learn from? Do you have any example, Charlotte?

Charlotte Birnbaum: Let me read one recipe, or ‘formula,’ as they called it, and you can see for yourself what you think: ‘The second course consists of four pieces on the plate. There will be quarter of a fennel bud, an olive, a candied fruit, and a tactile device. One ingests the olive, then the candied fruit, and then the fennel. Simultaneously, one moves the fleshy part of the tip of the index finger over the rectangular device, made up of a scrap of red damask, a small square of black velvet, and a snippet of sandpaper. From some carefully concealed sound source the notes of a piece from a Wagnerian opera issue forth, and at the same time the most skilled and graceful of the waiters spray perfume into the air. The results are astounding: Try it and be convinced.’4 D. Birnbaum: So it is a kind of “Gesamtkunstwerk”… a kind of synesthetic …?

Charlotte Birnbaum: I think it is about how you feel, smell, everything at the same time.

Kwinter: Cheese! [Laughter] An entire university curriculum could be based on cheese. To point out one thing here: The role of bacteria and other micro-organisms in our diet, in our broader ecology, and the magically transformative processes, such as fermentation, that they control. These biological processes are central ideas in gastronomy now, as we re-look at the processes in Japanese cuisine, for example, cooking with bacteria, the control of the natural, living matter … These are some of the things we stopped paying attention to! Without a doubt, in the very near future, bacteria as well as insects, etc., are going to make up a main staple of our diets. And we will in turn invent new aesthetic contexts to make them exciting and beautiful. Cheese, for example, can be disgusting if we do not know that that is what is going into our mouths. It is simply putrefaction. But in a gustatory context, when combined with a beautiful Bordeaux at the end of a dinner, when the bacteria is brought out to the table and we ingest it, it is utterly transcendent. No? [Laughter] D. Birnbaum: Fabrice, when you introduce the mouth into your artistic practice along with the whole register of the oral, why was that? We are used to thinking about the visual arts, where the eyes are the king of things, where it is all about seeing and the traditional painting is the most important in our history. There is hearing, and listening to music also has a grand history. So is it now the history of the oral?

Mazliah: Well, I think it was not very much about oral attributes or the fact of using something else than the eyes.

It was more about perceiving or the imagination, how we conceive of things when we are stimulated in certain alternative ways. I totally connect with idea of the cheese, how you grow it, in a cave or in a cellar. We would never touch it, but we know 35

From left: Charlotte Birnbaum, Fabrice Mazliah and Sanford Kwinter (May 29 , 2016)

that we can eat it. How it is presented is all about the aesthetic, how it is given for us to enjoy. We were trying to see if we could, not teach, but allow people to understand something else through different means than the eyes - so the oral. Then, of course, the organisation of how you have the dinner is also very important: you are all around the table, you have discussions, topics, ideas that come up. So food becomes also a pretext. You put things in your mouth, but you also take things out, so to say, by saying certain things. [Laughter] For us that was very interesting, how you engage differently when you are not obliged to. There is a whole different choreography when you stimulate another sense. The eyes over-control us; we consume mainly because of our eyes and not because something tastes good. For me, working with the body is not about the eyes. If you do a classical ballet, you are mostly trying to make things look a certain way, to re-produce a perfect image and one has the skills to do this. But when you work with alternative or contemporary approaches, you realise that you have to be a master not only about appearances but how one can produce certain sensations in order to induce certain movements.

And those sensations are very specific and very tricky. We wanted to share this with an audience which was trained only to look at the facade, so to speak. It is not that we succeeded, but we attempted to say: ‘Do not just look, but participate in another world.’

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D. Birnbaum: To read is to eat, to eat is to read - such is the oral obsession of the hermeneutic tradition, from the founders of biblical exegesis all the way up to Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Verschmelzung, his attempt to assimilate and digest the texts he reads. Digest everything. Engulf the text in its entirety, leave no details unread and external: one person who was mentioned and was still teaching in Städelschule when we started working in Frankfurt, Tobias, was Peter Kubelka. I remember he talked a lot about the fact that eating is a creative process. It is not the chef who is the artist but the one who eats. In Marcel Duchamp’s world, the viewer, the one who looks at the art piece, contributes at least half of it. And it is the speculative literary theory of Roland Barthes’ The Pleasure of the Text, where reading is posited as a creative activity. To be a master eater is interesting.

[Laughter] Are you a master eater, Tobias, in Kubelka’s sense?

Carsten Höller, who has been involved in conversations like this one for years, is an artist interested in many things. He is also, for example, a quite advanced ornithologist, and at some point I asked him why he does not turn or introduce that whole field into his art? But then he would always say that birds is what he likes the most, and why would he turn that into his profession?

I wonder, Tobias, that you are not introducing food into your art but only the things and contexts that are around the food. Is it to save food and eating, save it from becoming a part of your profession? [Laughter]

CULINARY LESSONS A CONVERSATION ABOUT FOOD, ART AND ARCHITEC TURE

Rehberger: I am not a believer in any kind of master something, so also not the master eater. [Laughter] As I said before, there are a lot of things one could include in one’s thinking and experience with food. I am not directly using it in my work because what I am doing has a lot to do with the idea that an artwork is not something that you just should have a confrontational relationship with: you “just” go there, look at it, and then you go home. I think art should be with you, around you, and that it has a lot of connections to the world. For decades, the attempt in art was to cut away as much as possible based on the idea that something would come out more clearly when nothing disturbs the art. I am the other way round: I think the more disturbance there is, the more you can understand, the more connections you can make. The more perspectives you can have on something, the more interesting it is.

Kwinter: Food today is fascinating because we have got to the point where the great chefs are now thinking fundamentals, the broad questions with and through food. There is another framing concept for everything that I have heard today from the panelists, one borrowed from the universe of those who have used psychotropic substances - or one could say ‘foods’ - in a disciplined, research-based way. This has a history over the last fifty years and refers to a principle known as “set and setting.”

The set is the mental or psychic state that a person brings to the session, how they have prepared themselves personally, what the set of givens are in their mind and brain, what their mood is, etc. etc. The setting is, of course, the control of all the parameters of the environment. These factors are universally seen to be key ones for the direction and success of the research and effects that one is pursuing. Set and setting are keystone structures that determine the duration and outcome of our experience. So it is the heart of the new epistemology, I would argue, with food, with these types of practices, how the senses engage the larger behavioural environment. The moment of eating is a way to cast a tension into the relationship between what we are doing and the extended world-system in which we are doing it, and to a certain degree this system is prepared. This system of “set and setting,” that used to lie outside of our curfew of attention, is brought to the foreground. And it is precisely this that lacks in virtually every area of our lives, in every one of our cultural pursuits. In many ways it is physical as well as mental; they are both actually corporeal.

Bettum: You seem to indicate that the corporeal, our bodies and our minds, takes on new dimensions with respect to what we ingest. There have been attempts, such as that of Georges Bataille around the 1920s and on, to break down the hierarchy between the rational and bodily experience but where the rational has always come out on top. So, a classical binary and oppositional relation between mind and body has prevailed. Are you suggesting a new form of integration through food?

takes place in flesh - our brain is also flesh. Brain and body are inseparable, and together they hold memory. Many chefs, and particularly Heston Blumenthal, are interested in this. Anyone who has ever taken in a perfume or a scent, heard a song on a bus and had a sudden rush of re-experiencing - for with these senses, it is not just memory; it is actually re-experiencing.

We know from neurobiology that 99.9% of what we imagine remembering is not remembering at all but rather re-experiencing. Experience and re-experience are inseparable. The sensations of eating, indeed all manipulations of the sensations of the body are everyday activities that we simply fail to use to access the potential of human experience. It is a mistake, the fathers of neurology tell us, to separate the mind and the body. In this, food offers us a new integral model.

It is one of the game changing developments taking place today - the understanding that perception and physical experience are one, which can have an incredible effect on art and architecture and how we think about the perception of space, the body in space, etc. And this goes far beyond the former clichés. Many practices that were so important in pre-technological civilisation have been largely lost today, so many of these intuitions lie under the surface, beyond routine access. Yet people have these foundational experiences that they simply do not know how to think about or use. I expect most of you in this room can recall certain unusual experiences - these might happen only once in a lifetime for some, for others multiple times - what one used to call ‘peak experiences’ or moments when one’s connection to the natural flow of things seems to be absolutely natural and totally involving.

These peak experiences are arguably always rooted in the body, but when one has them, one rarely knows how to think about them. It is my contention that by changing the way we think about food, we can change the way we think about how we experience the world generally, and this will assist us in processing these experiences of expanded access to both our senses, our bodies and the world in which they are situated.

NOTES 1) See Charlotte Birnbaum’s contribution to this issue, pp. 102-109. The text is based on her presentation in Venice that served as the introduction to the conversation herein.

2) Rivane Neuenschwander, Spell, in Portikus, December 8, 2001 - January 20, 2002.

3) elBulli was Ferran Adria’s restaurant near the town of Roses, Catalonia, Spain. He closed the restaurant in 2011.

4) A dish with Sounds and Smells in: F.T. Marinetti and Fillìa, On the Table, The Futurist

Kwinter: We live in our bodies. Furthermore, the brain is only artificially distinct from our bodies; our nervous activity

Cookbook, ed. Charlotte Birnbaum (Berlin: Sternberg, 2014), 100.

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Wonseok Chae, Milk

Kseniia Leonovich, Squash

Wu Kaixun

Alejandro Cruz Nacher, Meat

Wu Kaixun, Peas

Wu Kaixun, Eggs

Alejandro Cruz Nacher, Meat (steins)

Kseniia Leonovich, Squash

Wonseok Chae, Fermentation cheese

Wonseok Chae, Fermentation milk and cheese

PROJECT CREDITS The programme, Culinary Lessons, was carried out in Städelschule Architecture Class in the studio, Architecture and Aesthetic Practice, from October 2015 till December 2017.

The various parts and events engaged different collaborators, participants and supporters.

Below, these are listed. Städelschule Architecture Class is deeply grateful to all participants, not the least its students, and to collaborators and supporters.

Organisation: Deniz Ova (Istanbul Design Biennial Director) and Bahar Turkay (Communication and Operations Coordinator).

Photos: Poyraz Tutuncu Goethe-Institut Istanbul: Dr. Reimar Volker Participants: Mike Bouchet, Beatriz Colomina, Mehmet Gürs, Fabrice Mazliah, Tangör Tan, Mark Wigley

For Culinary Lessons overall and each event: Concept and programme director: Johan Bettum Programme management and production: Sylvia Fadenhecht

THE FEAST PROLEGOMENON FROM PEELINGS TO CORE STÄDELSCHULE, FRANKFURT, NOVEMBER 12. 2015 The Feast Prolegomenon was a collaboration between Städelschule Architecture Class and Atelier Slice with Jan Åman and Savinien Caracostea.

Participants: Dorothy Hamilton, Sayan Isaksson, Savinien Caracostea, Jan Åman, Fabian Lange (Genießerakademie), Tobias Rehberger, Hocine Bouhlou, Daniel Birnbaum and students in Architecture and Aesthetic Practice

THE FEAST STUDIO PROGRAMME AND DINING EVENTS FREITAGSKÜCHE AND THE FEAST Culinary consultants: Fabian Lange (Genießerakademie), Savinien Caracostea, Felix Bröcker, Matthias Schmidt, Hocine Bouhlou Architecture and Aesthetic Practice Seminars: Daniel Birnbaum Guest seminars: Fabian Lange (Genießerakademie), Savinien Caracostea, Felix Bröcker Music at The Feast, Dining Event: Lida Badafareh Students: Aditya Bakde, Alejandro Cruz Nacher, Jenny Choi, Kaushambi Mate, Kseniia Leonovich, Wittawin Sophakorn, Wonseok Chae, Wu Kaixun Additional help for The Feast, Dining Event: Students in Städelschule Architecture Class

CULINARY LESSONS, VENICE, MAY 29. 2016, AND CONVIVIUMEPULUM, VENICE, OCTOBER 29. 2016 Both events were a collaboration between Städelschule Architecture Class and the Goethe-Institut. Conviviumepulum was also a collaboration with Fabrice Mazliah. The events was part of Goethe Institut’s programme, Performing Architecture 2016.

Goethe Institut Curator: Susanne Traub Project management: Judith Kurz, Annalisa Grisi Project assistance: Rosina Franze, Isabel Hölzl, Patrick Ledderose Scenography: Michael Graessner Editing: Susanne Traub, Judith Kurz, Patrick Ledderose Translation: Chiara Sermoneta, V. Srinivasan Press Contact: Elisa Costa, Silke Neumann (BUERAU N) Design: Harri Kuhn (mischen) Printing: Spree Druck Berlin GmbH Photographer: Federico Sutera Catering: Marta Meo and Anna Elisabetta Benucci, Komida – Site Specific Food Location: Chiesa della Misericordia, Campo de l’Abazia (Cannaregio), Venice Participants Culinary Lessons: Jan Åman, Charlotte Birnbaum, Daniel Birnbaum, Fabrice Mazliah, Sanford Kwinter, Tobias Rehberger Conviviumepulum Concept: Fabrice Mazliah and Johan Bettum Programme consultant: Fabian Lange (Genießerakademie) Choreography: Fabrice Mazliah with Douglas Bateman Artistic contribution: Hannes Michanek Music: Nicola Di Croce Technical supervision and execution: Harry Schulz Technical assistant: Mattia Corvino Management: Annalisa Grisi Location: Venetian participants’ homes and Chiesa della Misericordia, Campo de l’Abazia (Cannaregio), Venice Participants Conviviumepulum: Marco Bravetti, Vittorio Castellani, Fabian Lange (Genießerakademie), Evelyn Leveghi, Marta Meo, Francesco Molinari, Florian Köller, Michele Savorgnano and Carolyn Steel

CULINARY LESSONS YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT ISTANBUL, NOVEMBER 3, 2016 In collaboration with the 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial, ARE WE HUMAN? The Design of the Species : 2 seconds, 2 days, 2 years, 200 years, 200,000 years, organised by the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (İKSV) and curated by Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley.

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CULINARY LESSONS THE ARCHITECTURE OF SUGAR STÄDELSCHULE, FRANKFURT, DECEMBER 1, 2017 Workshop leaders: Rolf Stålberg and Charlotte Birnbaum Participants: Florian Köller (L’Art Sucré), Fabian Lange (Genießerakademie) Student participants: Thoufiq Ahmed, Sara Ather, Prateek Bajpai, Soubhi Baraghit, Jeevika Bassan, Dua Nur Ciftci, Aruna A. Das, Yunus Emre Demirkiran, Gencay Derbentogullari, Mijail Alexei Franulic Sippa, Fiorella Gomez Silva, Harshita Gowda Chamaraja, Tong Guan, Hasan Hamdan, Haewook Jeong, Suyoung Ko, Divya Kumar, Soonam Lee, Amelia Marek, Panagis Marketos, Sogol Moaven, Aniruddha Mukherjee, Yeon Joo Oh, Chiraag Punjabi, Jun Eui Song, Ashwin Bharathi V.S. Velupillai Sugumar, Chawapol Watcharasukarn and André Zakhia.

IMAGE AND PROJECT CREDITS

IMAGE CREDITS EDITORIAL Pages 6-7: Sayan Isaksson, onion strips, The Feast Prolegomenon, Städelschule (2015).

Photo: Wonseok Chae

JOHAN BETTUM INTRODUCTION CULINARY LESSONS Page 9: Sayan Isaksson, onion soup and leftovers, The Feast Prolegomenon, Städelschule (2015). Photo: Wonseok Chae.

Page 10: Photo from Freitagsküche and of Fabian Lange and Yara Feghali courtesy of SAC. Page 11: Photos of Savinien Caracostea, Kseniia Leonovich, Isaksson and Hocine Bouhlou: Wonseok Chae.

Page 12: Photos from The Feast courtesy of SAC. Page 13: Guests at the Freitagsküche (2016). Photo: Savinien Caracostea.

Page 13: Scene from The Feast (2016). Photo: Vinay Shekar.

Pages 14-15: Sayan Isaksson, onions, The Feast Prolegomenon, Städelschule (2015).

Photo: Wonseok Chae.

Page 17: Yeonjoo Oh, Fiorella Gomez Silva, Chawapol Watcharasukarn, Haewook Jeong: Sugar creation. Photo courtesy of SAC. Pages 18-19: Prateek Bajpai, Soonam Lee, Andre Zakhia, Soubhi Baraghit, Suyoung Ko: Sugar creation. Photo courtesy of SAC.

CULINARY LESSONS A CONVERSATION ABOUT FOOD, ART AND ARCHITECTURE Pages 21, 22, 23, 24, 26-27, 30, 31, 34: Culinary Lessons in Chiesa della Misericordia, Venice (May 29, 2016). All photos: Federico Sutera.

Page 25: Peter Kubelka cooking in the Städelschule film kitchen for the lecture, Essbare und nicht essbare Mitteilungen (2015). Photo: Felix Bröcker.

Page 25: Air of carrot with curdled coconut milk, elBulli (2003). Photo: © Francesco Guillamet Ferran Page 25: Peter Kubelka, Concert and Dinner for Animals and Humans, Städelschule (February 8, 1983). Photo: Unknown.

Page 25: Ferran Adrìa at his lecture “Science and Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to the Science of Soft Matter,” given together with José Andres and Harold McGee, Harvard University, Loeb Theater, September 7, 2010. Photo: Rose Lincoln/Harvard University.

Courtesy of Harvard University.

Page 28: Tobias Rehberger, Was Du liebst, bringt Dich auch zum Weinen (2009), installation view, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Biennale di Venezia. Photo: Wolfgang Günzel, Offenbach.

Courtesy neugerriemschneider, Berlin.

Page 28: Lygia Clark, Canibalismo (1973), photo of the performance. Courtesy Associação Cultural “O Mundo de Lygia Clark,” Rio de Janeiro.

Page 29: Rivane Neuenschwander, Spell, exhibition view, 08.12.2001–20.01.2002, Portikus, Frankfurt. Photo: Wolfgang Günzel. Courtesy: Portikus and Wolfgang Günzel, Frankfurt.

Page 32: Tobias Rehberger and Rirkrit Tiravanija, Portikus XXX, installation view, 10.10.14.10.2017, Kleinmarkthalle Frankfurt. Photo: Diana Pfammatter.

Page 33: Tobias Rehberger and Rirkrit Tiravanija in Pop Up-Restaurant, Venice, Italy, 2013.

Photo: Katy Diamond Hamer, courtesy of Studio Rehberger.

CAROLYN STEEL SITOPIA - SHAPING OUR WORLD THROUGH FOOD Page 51 : Map of the Fertile Crescent. (Drawn by the author, with thanks to Matt Seaber).

Courtesy of Carolyn Steel.

Page 52: Map of the food supply to ancient Rome (drawn by the author Carolyn Steel).

Courtesy of Carolyn Steel.

Page 52: The maze of livestock pens and walkways at the Union Stock Yards, Chicago, Illinois, USA, ca. 1947. National Archives photo no. 111-B-4246 (Brady Collection) National Archives photo no. 80-G-32500. Credit National Archives (photo no. 306-NT186000). Courtesy National Archives, photo no. 26-G-3422, National Archives (111-SC202199).

Page 53: The Great Western Railway at Kelston Bristol and Exeter Railways, L. Hagues, 1840, courtesy of Carolyn Steel.

Page 53: Plan of the ancient city UR, courtesy of Carolyn Steel.

Page 53: George Scharf, A Cowkeeper’s shop in Golden Lane (1825), drawing on paper, 14 cm x 22,5 cm. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

Page 54: Letchworth Garden City Poster (1925). © First Garden City Heritage Museum.

Page 54: Ebenezer Howard, The Garden City Concept (1902). © Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies, reference: DE/Ho/F4/2.

Page 55: Garden Suburb, a view down a quiet street in Letchworth Garden City, Hertfordshire (November 1912). Photo by Topical Press Agency/Getty Images. Collection: Hulton Archive.

Pages 56-57: Almere Oosterwold Project, courtesy of MVRDV, Rotterdam, The Netherlands. © MVRDV

DANIEL BIRNBAUM MY EYE IS A MOUTH - ON DIETER ROTH’S ORAL AESTHETIC Page 58 and 59: Dieter Roth, Publiziertes und Unpubliziertes, exhibition view, 10.10.1987, Portikus, Frankfurt. Photo: Walter Kranl. Courtesy: Portikus, Frankfurt.

Page 60: Dieter Roth, Literaturwurst (1961 -1974), Photo: Thomas Giebel. Copyright Dieter Roth Foundation.

Page 60 and 61: Dieter Roth, Publiziertes und Unpubliziertes, exhibition view, 10.10.1987, Portikus, Frankfurt. Photo: Walter Kranl. Courtesy: Portikus, Frankfurt/Main

JOHAN BETTUM STAGING ZÜRICH - STAGING THE SUBJECT: ON MIKE BOUCHET’S THE ZÜRICH LOAD AND THE POSSIBILITY OF A POLITICAL SPACE Pages 63, 68-69, 77, 78, 80: Mike Bouchet, The Zürich Load (2016). Photo: Camilo Brau, courtesy of Mike Bouchet.

Page 64: Mike Bouchet and Paul McCarthy, BBQ Cooking Show, Rundgang 2014, Städelschule, Frankfurt. Photo: Ralf Barthelmes, courtesy of Barthelmes | Fotografie © Ralf Barthelmes, Frankfurt/Main.

Page 65: Mike Bouchet, Berlin Dirty Room, Berlin Biennale (2006). Foto: Uwe Walter, courtesy of Mike Bouchet.

Page 65: Mike Bouchet, Canburger (2008). Photo courtesy of Mike Bouchet.

Page 66: Van with announcement for The Zürich Load. Other pictures from the Werdhölzli Wastewater Treatment Plant. Photos courtesy of Mike Bouchet.

Page 70: Mike Bouchet, Drone Perspective (2016), diet cola and pencil on paper. Photo: Jessica Schäfer, courtesy of Mike Bouchet.

Page 71: Mike Bouchet, The Untitled Video, Marlborough Chelsea Gallery (2013). Photo: courtesy of Mike Bouchet.

Page 72: Joseph Beuys, The End of the Twentieth Century (1983-85). © Tate, London (2018).

Page 73: Anselm Kiefer, The Women of the Revolution (Les Femmes de la Révolution), 1992/2013 (detail). Lead beds: dimensions variable. Photograph on lead: 138 x 174 inches (350 x 442 cm). Photo: Arthur Evans, courtesy Hall Art Foundation. © Anselm Kiefer.

Pages 74 and 75: (From left to right:) Mike Bouchet, Bounty (Forn) (2016), oil on canvas, 160 x 130 cm; Bounty (Caprice) (2016), oil on canvas, 220 x 180 cm; Bounty (Becht) (2016), oil on canvas , 220 x 180 cm; Bounty (Half Turn) (2016), oil on canvas, 160 x 130 cm. Photos: Jessica Schaefer, courtesy of Mike Bouchet.

Page 76: Visitor of The Zürich Load. Photo: picture alliance / dpa / Keystone.

Page 79: Mike Bouchet, The Secret Behind a Good Mood (2016), diet cola and pencil on paper.

Photo: Jessica Schäfer, courtesy of Mike Bouchet.

Page 81: Mike Bouchet, Zürich Load, “Migros Art” (2016), diet cola and pencil on paper.

Photo: Jessica Schäfer, courtesy of Mike Bouchet.

CONVIVIUMEPULUM CULINARY PERFORMANCE, VENICE, OCTOBER 2016 Pages 86-87, 88-89, 91, 92-93, 94-95: Federico Sutera / Xframe Studio.

CHARLOTTE BIRNBAUM MY EYE IS A MOUTH - ON DIETER ROTH’S ORAL AESTHETIC Page 103: Good taste and symmetry in Antoine Carême’s Grand Buffet del la Cuisine Moderne (1812). In: Le Maitre-D’Hotel Francais, Traité des Menus, A servir a Paris a StPetersbourg, a Londres et a Vienne, par Antoine Carème, Tome Premier, Paris (1812).

Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

Page 104: Filippo Marinetti giving precise cooking instructions (ca. 1934). Photo: W. Seldow. © ullstein bild.

Page 105: Detail of photograph of Les dîners de gala, Salvador Dalí (1973) (Taschen: Köln, 2016). Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Figueres, 2018. First edition published by Felicie, Inc. (1973).

Page 106: Images from: Le livre de cuisine. La cuisine de ménage et la grande cuisine by French chef and “chef de bouche” Jules Gouffé (1867). Illustrations by Marcel Ronjat.

Photographic reproductions by Andrea Mariani / A13 Studio.

Page 107: Twelve of Carême’s architectural centre pieces in spun sugar, composed and drawn by the Carême (1812). In: Le Patissier Pittoresque composé et dessiné par M. Antonin Carême, 4. Edition, Paris (1842). Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

Page 108: Giacomo-Maria Giovannini (after Marc’Antonio Chiarini), centrepiece for the banquet of Senator Francesco Ratta, etching, engraving. Frontispiece from Disegni del convito (Designs of the Banquet) (Bologna: Per li Peri, 1693?). GRI Digital Collections.

Page 109: Marcantonio Chiarini and Giacomo-Maria Giovannini, Display of crystal and glass vessels (1693?), etching, (Disegni del convito fatto dall’illustrissimo signor senatore Francesco Ratta all’illustrissimo publico, eccelsi signori anziani and altra nobilità: terminando il svo confalonierato li 28. febraro 1693). GRI Digital Collections.

Page 110-111: Theodor Graminaeus and Franz Hogenberg, Banquet Table Decorated with Animals and Plants Made of Sugar Paste, engraving (1587). Getty Images.

KIVI SOTAMAA FINNJÄVEL - A THEATRE OF GASTRONOMY Page 113: Ateljé Sotamaa, Finnjävel, Helsinki (2016-18). Photo: Kimmo Syväri, courtesy of Ateljé Sotamaa.

Pages 114-115: Details with glasses and hare from Finnjävel. Photo: Nico Backström, courtesy of Ateljé Sotamaa.

Pages 116-117: Henri Alén and Tommi Tuominen, dishes at Finnjävel Photo: Nico Backström, courtesy of Ateljé Sotamaa.

Pages 118-119: Ateljé Sotamaa, Finnjävel tableware. Photo and drawings courtesy Ateljé Sotamaa.

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SAC JOURNAL No. 4 CULINARY LESSONS Series Editor: Johan Bettum Issue Editor: Johan Bettum Executive Editor: Sylvia Fadenhecht Editorial office: SAC Städelschule Architecture Class Dürerstrasse 10, 60596 Frankfurt am Main, Germany Tel +49 (0) 69 60500869, architecture@staedelschule.de https://sac.staedelschule.de/en Design and Layout: Jacqueline Jurt Image Editor: Jacqueline Jurt Image Compilation and Editorial Assistance: Liliane Werner, Shuruq Tramontini, Anna Arlyapova, Amelia Marek, Chiraag Punjabi, Soonam Lee Cover Image: Federico Sutera Logo design: Surface Gesellschaft für Gestaltung The editor has conscientiously endeavoured to identify and acknowledge all sources and copyright holders. All those holding illustration copyrights who have not been identified or credited can contact the editor.

SAC Journal is published one to two times per year.

Publication © Copyright 2018 by Spurbuchverlag Baunach, Germany; Städelschule Architecture Class, Frankfurt am Main; and authors.

All rights reserved.

No part of the work may in any mode (print, photocopy, microfilm, CD or any other process) may be reproduced or – by application of electronic systems – processed, manifolded or broadcasted without approval of the copyright holder.

The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic information is available on the internet at: http://dnb.d-nb.de SAC Journal 04 is generously supported by: Architekten- und Ingenieur Verein, Frankfurt am Main Chairperson of the Board: Axel Bienhaus; Vice-Chairperson: Giselher Hartung Culinary Lessons with events in Venice, Istanbul and Frankfurt have been made possible by the generous support of Kulturfonds RheinMain and Kulturamt Frankfurt as well as the Goethe-Institut in Milano and Istanbul.

Culinary Lessons were part of the programme in Goethe-Institut’s Performing Architecture 2016, curated by Susanne Traub.

Conviviumepulum in Venice was a collaboration with Fabrice Mazliah.

Culinary Lessons in Istanbul was part of the programme in 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial, curated by Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley.

AADR – Art, Architecture and Design Research publishes projects and research with an emphasis on the relationship between critical theory and creative practice.

AADR Curatorial Editor: Rochus Urban Hinkel, Stockholm Production: pth-mediaberatung GmbH, Würzburg Publisher: Spurbuchverlag Am Eichenhügel 4, D – 96148 Baunach, Germany Tel +49 (0) 9544 - 1561, Fax +49 (0) 9544 - 809, info@spurbuch.de, www.spurbuch.de Spurbuchverlag: www.spurbuch.de and AADR: www.aadr.info ISBN 978 –3– 88778–521– 5 ISSN 2198 –3216

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CULINARY LESSONS - The Space of Food is based on a series of events, Culinary Lessons, which were hosted by the Städelschule Architecture Class and which engaged with the relation between food, art and architecture. The series addressed the enormous social, economic and cultural spaces that accompany the production and consumption of food, and attempted to unravel some of these spaces‘ structure and dynamics. The central ambition was to learn from culinary history and, not the least, the recent vanguard of culinary practice.

No human activity is so encompassing and engenders such effects on our societies and lives as the culinary. Culinary practices lay out aesthetic as much as ethical trajectories that span from century-old traditions to lifesaving experiments for the present and future. They provide for human sustenance and the highest form of bodily enjoyment while transversing the spaces that they at once produce and profoundly affect.

This fourth issue of the SAC JOURNAL presents the central conversation in Culinary Lessons, which took place in Venice, together with a series of texts and projects that chart and speculate on the relationship between architecture, art and the culinary world. Contributors to this issue include, amongst others, Charlotte Birnbaum, Daniel Birnbaum, Mike Bouchet, Sanford Kwinter, Fabrice Mazliah, Tobias Rehberger, David Ruy, Kivi Sotamaa, Carolyn Steel, Jan Åman and Johan Bettum. It also features the winning projects of the AIV Master Thesis Prize in 2015 and 2016.

SAC JOURNAL is a publication series that addresses topical issues within architecture. The journal documents, critically reviews and presents theoretical discussions concerning contemporary design and research. The content of SAC JOURNAL is produced by invited contributors and students and faculty at the Städelschule Architecture Class.

© SAC JOUR N A L is published one to two times per year by the Städelschule Architecture Class (Frankfurt) and A ADR – Art Architecture Design Research (Spurbuch Verlag).

ISBN 978 – 3 – 88778 – 521– 5 ISSN 2198 – 3216