Body Landscapes International Performance Art Festival Presents:
Cooking in Reverse

September 28 – October 5, 2018
VerdensKulturCentret, Copenhagen
– more information –

Inspired by yet another food-centred performance that I did back in 2015 called What The Interval Tastes Like (where I cook a meal for my guest in their own home) Cooking in Reverse again proposes accompanying willing participants (in this case residents of Copenhagen) on their grocery shopping excursions in a first instance, to then (once again) offer these same participants the possibility of cooking their favourite meal in their kitchen. The particularity of this iteration for the Body Landscapes Festival comes from its multi-layered relational element. If the meal in question is of a culture that is still new to me I will inevitably become dependent on my guest, likely becoming their assistant while they instruct me on its preparation. This “reverse cooking lesson” thereby invites a “performative of circumstance,” where food becomes the transactional object (par excellence) calling these encounters into being. In turn, this site of negotiation through which our performative action emerges engenders a project about hospitality: about receiving and being received. And as food/our relationship to it is also intimately connected to a sense of cultural memory, individual/collective experience and identity, I wonder if a privileged space of intimate cultural exchange could open up, where the personal, social, and political become overlapping strands that may produce unexpected, and very rich, performative moments.

Curated by David Sebastian Lopez Restrepo, the full festival lineup includes:
Henrik Vestergaard and Ellen Friis (Liveart.dk)
Diana Soria Hernandez
Yong Sun-Gullach
Marta Moreno Muñoz
Pınar Derin Gençer
Jessie Kleemann
Stein Henningsen
Helinä Hukkataival
Boaz Barkan