Culinary Lesson: The Space of Food E-Book

Charlotte Birnbaum

• Herausgeber: Spurbuchverlag
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: SAC Journal
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Seitenzahl: 247

Beschreibung

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 so- cial, 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 ef- fects 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 con- versation 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 wor- ld. 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 isues 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 Städel- schule Architecture Class.

Leseprobe

CULINARY LESSONS

THE SPACE OF FOOD

SAC

JOURNAL

4

CONTENTS

4

EDITORIAL

CULINARY LESSONS THE SPACE OF FOOD

8

ESSAY JOHAN BETTUM

INTRODUCTION CULINARY LESSONS

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CONVERSATION CHARLOTTE BIRNBAUM, DANIEL BIRNBAUM,SANFORD KWINTER, FABRICE MAZLIAH, TOBIAS REHBERGER,JAN ÅMAN AND JOHAN BETTUM

CULINARY LESSONS - A CONVERSATIONABOUT FOOD, ART AND ARCHITECTURE

36

PORTFOLIO ARCHITECTURE AND AESTHETIC PRACTICE

THE FEAST - INGREDIENTS

50

ESSAY CAROLYN STEEL

SITOPIA

SHAPING OUR WORLD THROUGH FOOD

58

ESSAY DANIEL BIRNBAUM

MY EYE IS A MOUTH

ON DIETER ROTH’s ORAL AESTHETIC

62

ESSAY JOHAN BETTUM

STAGING ZÜRICH - STAGING THE SUBJECT

ON MIKE BOUCHET’s THE ZÜRICH LOAD AND

THE POSSIBILITY OF A POLITICAL SPACE

82

PORTFOLIO

CONVIVIUMEPULUM, VENICE, OCTOBER 2016

96

ESSAY DAVID RUY

THE ANIMAL THAT EATS PICTURES

102

ESSAY CHARLOTTE BIRNBAUM

NINE NOTES ON SUGAR, ART AND THE

DINING TABLE

112

ESSAY KIVI SOTAMAA

FINNJÄVEL A THEATRE OF GASTRONOMY

120

INTRODUCTION

THE AIV MASTER THESIS PRIZE 2015 & 2016

122

AIV MASTER THESIS PRIZE 2015 HONOURABLE MENTION

CHAKKARAT WONGTHIRAWAT

THE GARDEN ARCHIVE

HIGH RESOLUTION DIVERSITY

132

AIV MASTER THESIS PRIZE 2015 HONOURABLE MENTION

SANDRA EBUZOEME

STRANGE WALL

142

AIV PRIZE 2015 HONOURABLE MENTION

NATHAPHON PHANTOUNARAKUL

FRINGE

INSIDE THE FEATURELESS ASYMMETRICAL

BORDERS

152

AIV MASTER THESIS PRIZE 2016

JORGE LUIS CORDERO RUIZ

SOMEWHERE IN ORBIT, 2089

162

AIV MASTER THESIS PRIZE 2016

WONSEOK CHAE

THE FORM OF EXCESS

INHABITING ORNAMENTATION

174

AIV MASTER THESIS PRIZE 2016

KAUSHAMBI MATE

THE WEEKEND

186

PROJECT AND IMAGE CREDITS

188

COLOPHON

EDITORIAL

CULINARY LESSONS

THE SPACE OF FOOD

Over the last few decades, the culinary has emerged with an increasingly central place in our daily lives beyond providing sustenance. It has become an expression of marketable lifestyles, prominently featured in all kinds of publications, and chefs from all over the world are celebrated public personas, appearing as guests on television shows or hosting their own. Their cutting edge culinary practices draw on lessons from the sciences, and their restaurants present guests with extreme holistic, gustatory and aesthetic experiences.

Meanwhile, global culinary trends are kept in balance by a rising interest in local and seasonal produce and traditions. Sustainability and environmental effects weigh in against non-seasonal habits and the exoticism of food from the other side of the world. The less admirable part of the food industry is being examined for its - to say the least - questionable ethical and environmental practices. While starvation spreads in some parts of the world, the same industry and the supermarket chains provide the greatest riches to a few within one of the largest global industries.

Against this background yet mainly because the culinary throughout history is intrinsically linked to architecture and the arts, Culinary Lessons - The Space of Food, the fourth issue of the SAC Journal, explores select aspects of the relationship between these three. Beyond the obvious - that the culinary has been a motif in the arts since time immemorial and that architecture always has included spaces for storing, making and consuming food - architecture and art have come to entertain an intense and sometimes far-reaching fascination with food and the culinary. This fascination unfolds from historical precursors along materialist, aesthetic and social trajectories in recognition of how powerfully food and the culinary penetrate not only our lives but the contexts that enable and deliver the most rudimentary but also the most sophisticated human experience.

Culinary Lessons commenced mid-October 2015 as a pro-gramme in Städelschule’s Master Thesis Studio, Architectureand Aesthetic Practice, which is led by Johan Bettum and Dan-iel Birnbaum. Two years later, in early December 2017, it end-ed. By then, a series of public events - most of them conver-sations hosted with participating experts from various fields

- and a yearlong academic endeavour with a group of students had successfully been completed. Students and guests had been in extended conversations, prepared, served and enjoyed food and drink on many occasions, and participated in culinary performances. Two of these events are documented herein, one in the form of text, the other as a portfolio of pictures.

In the following Introduction - Culinary Lessons, the relationship between the culinary, architecture and art is further briefly elaborated and the different parts of the overall programme, which was conducted by Städelschule Architecture Class and hosted in different locations, introduced.

The relationship between the culinary, art and architecture was additionally expounded on with the help of experts in a public conversation hosted in Venice in spring 2016. The event took place within Goethe-Institut’s programme, Performing Architecture, and on the fringe of the Venice Architecture Biennale’s opening. The culinary historian Charlotte Birnbaum opened the event with a humorous presentation on sugar as material for creative work in the history of the culinary, architecture and art. She went on to account for the work of Marie-Antoine Carême, ‘the genius of classic French cuisine,’ past extravagant feasts, and the extreme positions on food held by the Futurist Filippo Marinetti and the Surrealist Salvador Dali. Her presentation suggested that an absolute distinction between the disciplines is not always obvious. Her presentation is included in the middle this issue in the form of an essay, Nine Notes on Sugar, Art and the Dining Table.

Charlotte Birnbaum’s presentation was a perfect introduction to the subsequent conversation in Venice where she, the architectural theorist Sanford Kwinter, the dancer and choreographer Fabrice Mazliah, the artist Tobias Rehberger, and the curator, writer and urban activist Jan Åman met with Daniel Birnbaum and Johan Bettum to elaborate on the theme. The transcript, Culinary Lessons - A Conversation About Food, Art and Architecture, witnesses both the profound, historical relations between these disciplines as much as the productive provocations that food can lend architecture and art - or, in the words of Kwinter: ‘… food is simply going back to the beginning … to the practice … to re-pattern our science, our art, our design - as a practice.’

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The introductory part of Culinary Lessons - The Space of Food ends with a picture portfolio that presents digital and analogue excerpts from students’ experiments with ingredients within the design studio, The Feast, which was the yearlong, experimental odysseys they understook in Architecture and Aesthetic Practice.

The students’ experiments centred on experimental, material transformations of ingredients for a feast hosted in Städelschule early 2016. Meanwhile, with Sitopia - Shaping Our World Through Food, the architect and writer Carolyn Steel situates food at the heart of an astounding history and an overwhelming nexus of political, cultural and economical forces in relation to urban morphology and urban life. Steel’s contribution comes out of her acclaimed book, Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives, and her essay herein helps to place this issue’s thematic concerns within the very large political and economical framework that pertains to the future of architecture and cities.

Daniel Birnbaum’s My Eye is a Mouth - On Dieter Roth’s Oral Aesthetic attends to another history, one situated in the arts and Städelschule. Birnbaum discusses the radical art of Dieter Roth as it was presented in 1987 in the inaugural exhibition of Städelschule’s gallery, Portikus. Roth used food, language and literature to break with traditional aesthetics with its prioritisation of the visual. Birnbaum’s short history provides evidence for the power that food has lent art in recent times and in its continued effort to afford us alternative ways of perceiving the self and reality.

Discussing the artist Mike Bouchet’s contribution to Manifesta 11 in 2016, Johan Bettum is everything but brief. He uses Bouchet’s sculpture, The Zürich Load, to explore the possibility of a political space in relationship to individual and collective identities. Bouchet’s sculpture was made using the daily ordure produced by Zürich’s inhabitants, and Bettum attempts to connect this culinary aftermath in art form to a space that sits between those that Steel and Birnbaum respectively address. In the process, he links minute culinary and corporeal sensations to the implied but nonetheless real and vast spatial expanse of food.

Städelschule Architecture Class’ programme, Culinary Lessons, revisited Venice in autumn 2016, once more courtesy of the Goethe-Institut and with the help of Kulturfonds Frankfurt Rhein Main and the City of Frankfurt, Department of Culture. For the occasion Fabrice Mazliah and Johan Bettum teamed up to conceive Conviviumepulum, a culinary performance that hosted more than fifty guests for a Venetian evening meal. The dishes were prepared by pairs guests, and the evening unfolded to the choreography and performance of Mazliah and his colleague, Douglas Bateman. The event is photo-documented with a portfolio herein.

Turning away from the material and gustatory delights of food, the architect David Ruy addresses the way that it is represented through images in his contribution, The Animal That Eats Pictures. Ruy’s interest goes beyond the fashionable imaging of the culinary to situate our ability to imagine and represent things as a unique human capacity traceable from our pre-historic to future survival as a species. Our representation of food, he argues, is at the heart of the culinary and a prime example of humans’ unique capacity to imagine, make and use images to represent reality.

After Charlotte Birnbaum’s essay, which follows Ruy’s, the architect Kivi Sotamaa describes Ateljé Sotamaa’s restaurant, Finnjävel in Helsinki, as a ‘theatre of gastronomy.’ He likens the project to a “Gesamtkunstwerk” where food, architecture and product design were staged in unison. The seductive space that Sotamaa documents, attests to architects’ not-uncommon ambition to link culinary and spatial experience. Yet, Sotamaa’s “theatre” is at once a rousing counterpoint and accompaniment to Ruy’s space of representation.

The last part of this issue presents the projects that earned a prize or honourable mention in SAC’s AIV Master Thesis Prize 2015 and 2016. In 2015 Chakkarat Wongthirawat, Sandra Ebuzoeme, and Nathaphon Phantounarakul earned honourable mentions; in 2016 Jorge Luis Cordero Ruiz, Wonsoek Chae, and Kaushambi Mate shared the prize. Chae and Mate’s respective projects were carried out within The Feast, the programme of Architecture and Aesthetic Practice.

Overleaf: Sayan Isaksson, onion strips, The Feast Prolegomenon, Städelschule (2015)

JOHAN BETTUM

INTRODUCTION

CULINARY LESSONS

Exploring the world of food and the culinary in relation to architecture and the arts is concomitant to taking on the indisputable: food, drink and culinary culture are intimately linked to and embedded in the histories of architecture and the arts. Daily rituals for shelter and sustenance as much as festive occasions celebrating secular traditions, religious figures and events, or political power are inscribed and manifest in buildings, cities, pictures, decorative objects and sculpture since time immemorial. When Gottfried Semper (1803-1879), the German architect and theorist, in 1851 attempted to explain the origins of architecture, one of his four elements was the hearth, the first sign of human settlement.1 Over the flames food was prepared and around it social life unfolded. Pre-historic art depicts scenes of hunting, and since the Renaissance, Mannerist and Baroque periods, food, culinary practice and consumption are commonplace motifs in art. Obvious examples are Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s (1526 or 1527– 1593) use of fruits, vegetables and other edible items to make human portraits, Michelangelo Caravaggio’s still life, Basket of Fruit (1596), or the still-life paintings of the Dutch Golden Age, exemplified by the work of Frans Hals (1582–1666).

The trajectories of this history continue till our age while with the dawn of Modernity it also becomes radically trans-

formed and expanded far beyond the once dominant mode of representation, painting. Latter-day architecture and art engaging with the culinary have not shied away from employing food and decaying consumables as the materiality for the work itself, and - not the least - food and the culinary have been used to expand the social and political footing and reach - particularly in the arts - through performances and direct engagement with the audience.

However, if tenaciously querying and probing the obvi-ous, untold horizons may arise, beyond which new indefiniteopportunities may lie. This was the motivation behind theprogramme, Culinary Lessons, which commenced in Städel-schule’s Master Thesis Studio, Architecture and AestheticPractice, in autumn 2015. Architecture and Aesthetic Practiceexplores architecture in relation to the arts to infuse archi-tectural design with original and critical ideas and practices.At this juncture when architecture has lost much of its criticaledge due to its allegiance with technological positivism andcapitalist incentives, the studio relates selectively to the arts inorder to critically engage with and revitalise conceptual, theo-retical and practical aspects of architectural design. The studioaspires to radicalise the flow of information, concepts andprocedures that constitute architectural design to engender

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new and experimental reflections on the discipline as much as project proposals.

Hence, Culinary Lessons aimed at exploring culinary history and contemporary culinary practices as a way of tapping into the near infinite material realm that food presents. Central to this interest was the radical transformations of matter that culinary practices administer for carefully choreographed ex- perience. In doing so, the culinary is the most profound, contemporary materialist-aesthetic practice, operating potentially in an unparalleled holistic fashion, linking human consumption and gustatory experience to vast social and spatial contexts. Within these, the individual human body becomes physically connected to near and distant sites of food production and processing, partakes in social rituals and practices, and is inscribed in expansive political-economical systems.

ARCHITECTURE, ART AND THE CULINARY

Architecture’s relation to the culinary is in the most obvious way direct through the role of kitchens and dining areas and central to any proposal for housing and by and by institutional projects. When the Austrian architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky designed the Frankfurt Kitchen in 1926 for

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

Ernst May’s social housing project New Frankfurt, it was a milestone and anticipated modern, fitted kitchens with its unified solution that were to enable efficiency and be realised at low cost.2 Whereas the social and economical ambitions of the Frankfurt Kitchen largely have been replaced by consumer interests and hyper-marketable products, the heritage lives on with the centrality of the culinary in contemporary architectural design. From IKEA via Boffi and Bulthaup to the displayed machinery of industrial kitchens in restaurants, the heart of culinary life has become the site of consumer lifestyle and a luxury symbol.

With the dawn of Modernity, however, it was art and notarchitecture that lent an exploratory and experimental impulseto everything that concerns food. There is continuity fromPaul Cezanne’s still-lifes with apples from the latter half ofthe 19th century to Andy Warhol’s 32 hand-painted canvasesfrom 1962 depicting Campbell’s soup cans.3 The artists’ sharedmotif is food, and the work of both took the pulse of chang-ing representational opportunities within a disciplinary andmedium-specific art form, painting. Meanwhile, other artistsamongst the Futurists and Surrealists had expanded the inter-ests in food and gastronomy, reflecting how these movementswere both artistic and social. Two central instances of this with

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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 workwith food. The American architect-turned-artist contributed in1971 to the founding of FOOD, an artist-run restaurant in NewYork.6 The restaurant emerged in part from ‘a floating dinnerparty scene’ populated by artists, and Randy Kennedy, report-ing on a retrospective of Matter-Clark’s work at the WhitneyMuseum of American Art, quotes Mitchell Davis, executive vicepresident of the James Beard Foundation, saying ‘that while res-taurants like FOOD bubbled up from the counterculture, their

influence eventually changed mainstream culture.7 To Kennedy, Matta-Clark’s work exemplify ‘the close but sometimes unsung affinities between the worlds of art and food, [while] also [being] one celebrated example of their coming together, …’

Fabian Lange, left, and SAC student Yara Feghali

THE CULINARY AND STÄDELSCHULE

Cooking has a special place in the Städelschule and its gallery, the Portikus, and Culinary Lessons was conceived of with a clear reference to this history.8 The inception of a quasi-formal programme for cooking at the Städelschule came in 1978 when Peter Kubelka, the Austrian independent filmmaker, artist and theoretician, was appointed professor of the Film Class. In 1980 he re-designated his professorship being for “Film and Cooking as Forms of Art” and became the key figure in establishing the role of food and cooking within the art academy. Besides his work as a teacher, Kubelka’s annual Gasthaus (“Ta-vern”) enjoyed immense popularity and served as a stage for his art and as a place for interdisciplinary encounters. Moreover, the week-long international symposium entitled Gasthof (“Inn”) in 2002, saw artists and architects from different countries present regional specialties to hundreds of guests every evening.

Since Kubelka’s inclusion of food and cooking in the school’s programme, numerous artists - both from the faculty and visitors - have engaged formally and informally with the culinary. Important occasions have been in the exhibition programme of Portikus, founded by the school’s former dean, Kaspar König, who was appointed in 1987 and also immediately opened the school’s cafeteria, the central hub for the institution’s social life.9

In 2001, artist Rirkrit Tiravanija created an event space,Untitled, 2011 (Demo Station No. 1) in the gallery, and its pro-

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Savinien Caracostea and student Kseniia Leonovich

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

gramme included ‘cooking battles’ between pairs of invited guests. When he returned in company of Pierre Huyghe and Pamela M. Lee with their show Gordon Matta-Clark - In the Belly of Anarchitect in 2004, the trio collaborated with the school’s chef, Hocine Bouhlou, in an attempt to stage a Matta-Clark-experience. The preparations included a workshop with students in the gallery where bread was baked and used to construct a large wall that partitioned the gallery space.10

There have been other formal events revolving around food,11 and the informal occasions are yet more numerous. Hence, Culinary Lessons naturally found its place within this small institution where culinary experiments and food figure centrally as a means to make art endeavours possible while producing vibrant and far-reaching social settings.

PROGRAMME AND EVENTS IN CULINARY LESSONS

Culinary Lessons lasted two years and ended with a workshop and a small exhibition event centring on sugar as a material for sculpting in December 2017. Altogether, the project included three public events comprising of salon-style conversations with invited guests about topics related to architecture, the arts and the culinary; a one-year design programme in the studio, Architecture and Aesthetic Practice, that involved eight students exploring food and culinary topics related to architecture while being guided by a mixed group of experts drawn largely from the culinary field; two dining events hosted by the same students as part of Architecture and Aesthetic Practice’s studio programme; a culinary performance; and, lastly, the aforementioned workshop and exhibition with sugar in which 28 students at SAC participated.

Overall the undertaking comprised of an experimental voyage with aspects of the culinary as the central interest which eventually lent inspiration and general, generic lessons

for architectural design and the arts for everyone who partook. The work in Architecture and Aesthetic Practice is driven by an intense engagement with medium-specific design processes. That means - apart from, for instance, using plating as a compositional procedure in form making - that food and culinary processes will only indirectly lend themselves as lessons for architectural design or, for that matter, art.

Below the separate parts of the programme in Culinary Lessons are briefly accounted for:

The Feast Prolegomenon - From Peelings to Core

Städelschule, Frankfurt, November 12, 2015

Culinary Lessons commenced with the public event, Prolegomenon, which featured a salon style conversation between the founder of the International Culinary Center in New York, Dorothy Cann Hamilton,12 the artist and Städelschule professor Tobias Rehberger, and Daniel Birnbaum. In addition the curator and writer Jan Åman and author, journalist and wine critic Fabian Lange gave respective presentations. The Prolegomenon framed some of the key interests and questions that were to be pursued practically in the studio, Architecture and Aesthetic Practice, as well as in subsequent conversation hosted within Culinary Lessons. This included the history of food and cooking in architecture and the arts, the role of cooking and chefs in the 21st century, and how the respective disciplines engage with innovation and its role in forming the future.

The event concluded with Sayan Isaksson - founder of Esperanto in Stockholm and a Michelin-star chef, serving a soup for participants and guests, while architect, pastry chef and cultural entrepreneur Savinien Caracostea offered pastry made for the occasion. Städelschule students took part in both the preparations and serving of the food.

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INTRODUCTION CULINARY LESSONS

The Feast - The Studio Programme

AAP, Städelschule Architecture Class, 2015-16

During its first year, Culinary Lessons was anchored in the academic, experimental programme of the Master Thesis Studio, Architecture and Aesthetic Practice, which on the occasion was named The Feast. The programme aimed at informing the students’ creative work processes and conceptual planning by shifting the attention to the ephemeral production in the kitchen. By unfolding the traditional elements that constitute a holistic dining experience - food, service, physical setting and atmosphere - and understanding their temporality, The Feast explored a new framework for creating sequenced composition, defining spatial choreography and producing architectural effects. The work sought to liberate formal processes in architectural design from the intrinsic constraints of how a project traditionally is conceived, planned and executed.

The yearlong programme was divided in two parts, coinciding with the two semesters that make up the academic year. The first semester was devoted to exploratory culinary work and accompanying design experiments. The studentsspent a large amount of time in various kitchens working with renown chefs and culinary experts, and pursuing lessons from the art of cooking and its radical and innovative transformation of matter into choreographed and carefully orchestrated gustatory and social experiences. The work comprised of basic learning, supported by a series of seminars on various culinary topics interspersed by shorter study trips. This included broad topical interests such as food and ingredients, sequencing of menus, aesthetics of plating, select culinary history, and theories of our relationship to food and how it shapes our lives and the cities we live in.

Each student studied a select ingredient and its transformation relative to specific variables. The first semester culminated with the various experiments being brought together to form the menu for a final dining event with guests (see The Feast, Dining Event, below). In this manner, The Feast abstracted and explored architects’ creative work process and goal oriented planning by shifting the attention to the ephemeral production of a dinner party.

The architectural lesson in this was understood in choreographic, spatial and aesthetic terms, and the second semester saw students attempting to transpose the results of their respective work with culinary and oenology subject matter to propose a critical design intervention that included a culinary function on an existing cultural institution in Frankfurt. These proposals comprised of the students’ respective final design projects.

Freitagsküche - AAP Students Hosting

Frankfurt, January 22, 2016

Freitagsküche is a restaurant in Frankfurt founded by, amongst others, the artist and Städelschule alumnus, Michael Riedel. The restaurant has typically seen artists gather to cook

on a weekly basis. In preparations for the dining event, The Feast, students in Architecture and Aesthetic Practice, guided and helped by professional experts, prepared the full menu and service one evening.

Above, students working at The Feast. Below, Matthias Schmidt with others in the kitchen (2015). Opposite page, above, guests at the Freitagsküche (2016), and below, a scene from The Feast (2016).

The Feast, Dining Event

Städelschule, February 13, 2016

As part of the programme of Städelschule Rundgang, the school’s open-house exhibition, students in the studio, Architecture and Aesthetic Practice, prepared and hosted a dining event for 70 guests, served in three subsequent sittings. The menu of The Feast was based on the students’ culinary experiments and studies during the semester. It consisted of six courses and was based on the eight ingredients that the students respectively had worked with. The carefully choreographed and lavish meal was set with guests seated alone or in varied numbers at very different type of tables - one, for instance, on the floor and another with a couple physically secluded by a wooden frame with a curtain.

The Feast as much as the work during the semester was guided by Fabian Lange, Savinien Caracostea, the chef and writer Felix Bröcker, and the chef Matthias Schmidt who has held two Michelin stars at Villa Merton in Frankfurt.

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INTRODUCTION CULINARY LESSONS

Overleaf: Sayan Isaksson, onions, The Feast Prolegomenon, Städelschule (2015)

Culinary Lessons, Salon Talk

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

This public event, with the same name as the overall programme featured herein, was part of Goethe-Institut’s proprogramme, Performing Architecture, which took place in Venice in parallel with the 15th International Architecture Exhibition 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 Veniceand 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 andMark 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 colleagueand researcher, Tangör Tan. From Frankfurt arrived the American artist Mike Bouchet and Fabrice Mazliah. The conversa-

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.