Embodied Flavours: A Fabric of Cultural Exchange and Connection

Solveigh Artschwager
Embodied Flavours: A Fabric of Cultural Exchange and Connection
Video documentation of a performance
2023-ongoing

Embodied Flavours: A Fabric of Cultural Exchange and Connection is an ongoing series exploring cultural exchange in an interconnected world of rising populations and globalized cultures. A series in which apparent familiar habits transform into something unknown – where foreign becomes familiar.

For this chapter of the series, the artist focused on togetherness creating a unique experience for a group of participants sharing a meal and eating together. This video-documentation presents the performative event proposed at Free University in Bozen on April 20, 2023, when an international group participated in a ‘food portrait’.

After being asked to write down their appetites consequent physical exercise (in the days previous to the performance), the participants proposed 15 recipes, later transformed into an experience based on a 3-course meal conceived by the artist as a ‘food portrait’: Primal Slime, Fusion Salad, and Geographic Dumpling. Sitting on a white cloth, the blindfolded participants had the food placed on the back of their hands, as they licked the group food portrait. The tablecloth acts as a platform for sharing foreign experiences, fostering exchange beyond cultural norms and conventions.