Taste Your Taste

2015-2016

Taste Your Taste is a concept of Performance in the form of a Dinner party around the theme of the five senses: touch, smell, taste, sight and hearing.

TYT brings together a group of contemporary art professionals, the culinary art and that of science to deliver to the participants a very personal experience directly through their body by the conscious act of eating. For each Performance-Dinner I created a distinctive ambience, always in an unusual and different venue. The artist Andréa Mastrovito, the sponsor for TYT, created a special illustration, graphite on paper, to be sold in a limited edition at each event. TYT also invited other pertinent artists to participate in these themed salons.

To date, three senses have already been explored with the curator Flaminia Scauso: taste, hearing and smell.

taste

The Dinner Performance around the sense of taste plays with the double meaning of the word itself; the physical taste of the items and taste as a moral judgment, in other words, good and bad taste. The performance consists of creating three distinct moods for each of the three courses through starter to dessert; three suppers as seen in the painting by Leonardo da Vinci; three suppers in which I accompany the participants on their path from paradise to hell and on to resurrection.

hearing

One is unaware that hearing represents 40% of our perceptions and therefore the information we receive. During the evening, the participants were placed in an anechoic chamber, that is to say in a space which absorbs 99.9% of sound and makes the human ear more sensitive to noise. The experience plays on the exchanges between listening attentively and periphery listening that one is not always conscious of. In this Performance Piece I write on a board, throughout the evening, all the periphery sounds made by the participants in the room, and so reveal what remains unconscious to the audience.

Smell

This performance refers to the work of the psychoanalyst Vittorio Bizzozero on the importance of smell already present in the fetus. When a mother smells her child, she creates the first olfactory vessel and this allows the child to build their own personality maintained throughout life. In this same welcoming gesture, I approach each participant to breathe into them like a caring and protective mother. This is a very intimate gesture, which places the participant in a vulnerable and naked state. The public is dressed in decontamination suites as if entering a laboratory to participate in an experiment. The evening around smell confronts the dogma of mass consumption which often uses smell as a lure.

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