History repeats itself twice, first as a tragedy, then as a farce

The title of the show refers to the most quoted and misquoted phrase from Karl Marx’s “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon” in which he refers to Hegel’s idea about important historical events and persons appearing twice.1 The show presents artists who are working with the carnivalesque character of history in these changing political circumstances. Revolution creates pathos that attempts to conquer the future – Cronus swallows his children, and the counterrevolution vomits back time – anorexia caused by the fear of the overwhelming return of the living dead.

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The exhibition May Not the Soul Be as Balloons directly references Estelle Hoy’s lead essay, which outlines and defines the content of this year’s Curated by theme: Comedy. Hoy’s text is captured verbatim and transformed into a curatorial concept on a semantic basis.

This is made possible with the help of the AI-based text generator and computer system Poetry Machine, which was invented, developed, and programmed by the artist and media theorist David Link.

Poetry Machine is capable of writing its own reflections, descriptions and texts. It is fed with four or five words and associatively picks out other suitable word and sentence components from the Internet, which it then assembles into complete texts.

This ability has now been used to curate the exhibition May Not the Soul Be as Balloons. 14 short sections from Estelle Hoy’s main essay, mostly consisting of just a few words or sentences, were entered into the Poetry Machine. With the help of its algorithm, it autonomously generated 14 detailed descriptions of works.

On the basis of these work descriptions, 14 artists then created the paintings, sculptures and installations for the exhibition. In the gallery space, the works are arranged in the order in which Poetry Machine wrote the descriptions of the works. Via a sound installation, the visitor hears the texts read by the actress Mavie Hörbiger.

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Expanded Craft

This exhibition presents two artists; Noa Eshkol (1924 – 2007, Israel) and Natsuko Uchino (b. 1983, Japan, lives in Belvézet, France): women from different generations whose work deals with notions of expanded craft. The works presented deal with recycling materials and concepts of local sustainability. They push the limits of traditional skills and craft materials while relocating them in the contemporary art ecosystem.

Noa Eshkol is primarily a radical choreographer. In 1954 she founded the Noa Eshkol Chamber Dance Group and invented the pioneering Eshkol-Wachman Movement Notation to capture and analyze corporeal movement. In parallel to her dance practice, she produced hundreds ​‘Wall Carpets’ similar to quilts, starting in the early 70’s for a period of more than three decades. She pieced together scraps of fabric collected from textile workshops or gifted from friends and sewed them on larger swaths of fabric, such as blankets or bedspreads. Those vibrant and colorful abstract works can be displayed either horizontally on the floor or vertically on the walls and are only composed of found elements without a single fragment ever being cut.

Natsuko Uchino is an inter-disciplinary artist whose practice is defined by experiences in agriculture and crafts. Her works relate art to ecology and food through the use of ceramics. After her studies at Cooper Union in New York City, she began to produce ceramic recipients while leading an alternative farming project in the USA (Art and Agriculture, 2007 – 2011). She then developed her technique through frequent trips to Japan. For this exhibition she created new ceramic objects that expand the domesticity of her previous jars, bowls or plates along with wooden sculptures. Those new ceramic sculptures are displayed vertically on pedestals composed entirely of found elements of plaster and brick. As an environmental activist she carefully chose the nature and the source of her materials.

Both artists share a profound interest in nature. Noa Eshkol cultivated a garden at her home in Holon where tightly packed ferns, cacti, trees and flowers of all descriptions abounded in her personal nursery. The Noa Eshkol works selected for this exhibition are titled referring to those concerns: ​‘Very Orange Tree’, 1992, ​‘Wind In The Forest’, 1995 or ​‘Wild Tree I’, 1989, for example. Natsuko Uchino is currently developing a free garden in her new house in the south of France where she explores living materials through fermentation and questions the notions of time and conservation in the context of art and ecology. She often uses living materials such as mushrooms, kefir or pickles in her artwork.

When Noa Eshkol created the design of her wall carpets, she did not embroider them but let her dancers do it.“Group work played an important part in the history of quilting. The term ​‘Quilting Bee’ denotes the joint effort of a group of women, quilting together the work of one of the group member. It’s a social encounter.” (Shula Liss, ​‘Tradition and Practice in Noa Eshkol’s Wall Carpets’, in Textile Tales, The open Museum, Tefen Industrial Park, Israel, 2010)

For more than a decade Natsuko Uchino developed the ongoing ​‘Keramikos’ project together with artist Matthew Lutz-Kinoy. It consists of a traveling series of ceramic collections which celebrate local culinary cultures and collaborative practices based on conviviality and exchange. Keramikos has been presented in numerous exhibitions and activated through dinner events and performances at various locations, each time featuring different protagonists: artists, curators and friends.

Finally as a last common point, both artists developed a teaching practice. Noa Eshkol taught at the Drama School of the Cameri Theatre, Tel Aviv, known for its experimentalism and Natsuko Uchino is currently a professor of Sculpture, specialized in ceramics at Ecole supérieure d’art et de design in Le Mans, France. She directs the program MAGMA, a master of Arts in Geo-Materials. The acronym refers both to the material transformation process and to global warming. Her program offers practical teaching based on the physical and semantic study of earth material and its derivatives.

The exhibition is the theater of a resurgence in craft practices in a city famous for its heritage in applied arts. In both artists research, there is an aspect of the Dionysiac, which is part of the comedy. They push it to the limit. Is that a comedy? A serious one for sure.

Nicolas Trembley

this is a love poem, is a group exhibition that reclaims the language of humour through a Black feminist perspective as found articulated in contemporary performance and poetry. It offers a response on how political satire is an unapologetic and poetic tool for resistance and laughter, a measure to provoke unconscious discomfort from the receiver. The exhibition allows us to question how, through time, the Black body has fed colonial imaginaries within comedy through inappropriate representations, roles and caricatures. It is a statement of how it is reappropriated today as a virulent tool for testimony, shifting narratives from mainstream to traditional formats. From a theatrical reappropriation of the figure of Pierrot the clown, to a TV show of irrational improvisation, the exhibition moves away from the historically hegemonic forms of satire. It is through complexified narratives, in which the performative Black body exists, that it offers nuanced critiques on colonialism, nationalism, identity, and belonging. Awkward gestures, exaggerated facial expressions, the body as a prop are all a part of the staging of humor with the virulent words that accompanies it. A virulent love language. The exhibition will present works both at E X I L E's gallery space and online with the parallel launch of the new online platform E X I L E TV.

How to tell a structure? How to narrate this thing that is both pervasive and invisible, both determined and determining, both repressive and enabling? With Sohrab Shahid-Saless’ film In der Fremde, the structure has clear contours: It designates the way in which exploitation, inequality and dehumanization is being maintained on an everyday basis. As much as a structure cannot be shown directly, it can be rendered visible through a series of detours: No plot but environments, no psychology but frames, no catharsis but mechanical repetition.

Tricksters

What is under the carpet is not visible. When something is swept under the carpet it may not attract attention and is not mutable. Pulling the rug out from someone's feet, metaphorically unsettling someone’s belief and material existence, is a classical slapstick trick. How many hours have you spent watching or playing cartoon characters getting their heads flattened by frying pans and bodies smashed into accordions? Slapstick slyness is the trickster’s weapon of choice, neither villain nor hero but both, one and the other. Removing the rug might open a trap door into the grainy duplicity of what we call common reality. Robert Breer’s rug sculpture hovers through the gallery. The ‘Floats’ are like nodes that mark the convergence of multiple trains of thought. Made of painted styrofoam, neutral in color and shape, the motorized objects move slowly, animated like buoys in the sea. With great tranquility, they seem to follow random paths, introducing a kinetic energy that proliferates the possible points of view of the very moment. And then, they casually drift out of the picture. Operatic vocals slashing through drony electronic noise recall ancient dramas, existential ambiguities that can never be fully resolved. Micalea Tobin’s voice condenses on the glass ceiling and runs down the gallery walls. The four-channel sound installation, commissioned for this exhibition and produced together with Rhea Fowler could be an homage to the trickster, a folklore figure native to many pre-colonial mythologies. Neïla Czermak Ichti’s witty observations draw latent meanings to the surface. The precise but casual ballpoint drawings on cropped paper open up multiple frames of reference to everyday moments of life. Drawn from her personal archive—photos of her family combined with stills from early mafia films and screenshots from horror movies—Ichti’s characters transmit the tempers and tunes of the weird. Sporting Sonic, Caspar, or Alien on their T-shirts, they invite us to redefine our certainties about the unreal and remind us that meanings never stand still. They move, volatile like a voice or like the rug beneath your feet.

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to do without so much mythology

(...) With the arrival of modernity and scientific thinking, the myth had to migrate into the peripheries of storytelling… into the curious, the weird, even the morbid. And nowadays a potential residue of mythical thinking might be found in that suspension of logic underlining our relationship to the comic and the tragic… two fields where feelings, habits and archetypes dominate as moulding forces.

Again: what has all this to do with art? A lot. That’s why here you’ve got two shows. Two exhibitions running parallel to each other. One visible (with works by 5 artists: Beth Collar, Simon Dybbroe Møller, Sophie Jung, Lukas Thaler, Kostis Velonis), the other invisible (with spoken pieces by writers and artists Bob Kil, Paul Becker, Holly Pester, Luis Felipe Fabre, Sarah Tripp). The first show is silent, the second spoken. One exhibition becomes the shadow of the other, and yet they are both completely interchangeable. Like the two sides of the same coin, like comedy and tragedy existing together, only together. Silent objects and bodiless words, both treating the idea of the comic as a mythological category of thinking, something that is all praxis, pre-reasoning, no real separation between concept and object. And yet everything here exists only thanks to an agreement between the two parts, between what is left there to be seen and who sees it. I have no real answer. I don’t exactly know what all this has to do with art. And I guess that’s the show.

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i’m 2 happy!

Look sweetheart. None of this is real. It's just a game that the grown-ups are playing. All you gotta do is play along. OK?

The game is late-stage capitalism, and its appetite is insatiable. Consume or be consumed. Feed yourself, and your dreams. Achieve true happiness by sustained success. Rate yourself, and survey everything you purchase and consume, so we can continue improving and innovating. If there was a symbol for this era, it might be the smiley face. In Rachel Maclean’s work, wide-eyed, rosy-cheeked smiley faces unnerve in how saccharinely they radiate the cyclical violence of consumerism.

Part of that violence lies in how companies infantilise us to manipulate our decisions. In Feed Me (2015), one of Maclean’s longest and most ambitious films to date, society’s simultaneous infantilisation and sexualisation of women is portrayed through the classic fairytale story between beast and young girl. In what could be a reworking of the seven deadly sins – pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony and sloth – Maclean constructs an entire world encrusted with prosthetics and crystallised by hairspray, at once slick, shiny, cute, and dirty, seedy, dripping with disgust. In its artifice, theatricality, playful irony and exaggeration, the work oozes camp, and yet at the same time its dark humour criticises the very thing it mines.

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An Incomplete & Unreliable Guide to Social Media War Room

Let’s be clear. This guide is incomplete and unreliable, the data conflicting or missing, the war hybrid and ongoing. The room is a riddle in a labyrinth. Social media a synonym for something else. We are still trying to understand what else, exactly. “The moment has come when all the crises – economic, ecological, migration, informational and political – are intertwined, and nobody can entirely figure out where they originated and how to address them but many declare to have ‘the solution’,– concludes Marta Barandiy in her policy paper about the Russian information war against the West. However, this statement also accurately reflects the nature of the ongoing information wars. Thus, here we are, surfing between various waves of pandemics and various ecopolitical crises, trying to control, monitor and understand – not necessarily in this order – ourselves and the ever-changing world.

What is the Social Media War Room?

Social Media War Room (SMWR) may be described as a particular area that is specially designed to extract insights by visually monitoring certain real-time actions. Thus, it consists largely of multiple screens displaying data from an arsenal of sources. Accordingly, the exhibition is built around diverse works that are connected to monitoring (semi)public acts, mining reality, researching social networks in Ancient Greece, behavioral surplus, data exhaust, political demonstrations, leaked material, media spectacles, various online collections, public voyeurism, amongst others. SMWR may be compared to the News Room or War Room – they all are rooms for monitoring and controlling the ongoing situation.

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DIE EINSAMKEIT DES SATYRS

The satyr is alone. The satyr does not belong to any nation, to any association, to any trade union, to any movement. The satyr is a creature of the woods: he has a black eye, a clown nose, a wooden body like Pinocchio. You will never see him participating in a large gathering, a television programme, a debate on social media. The satyr does not sign petitions, does not play golf and avoids conferences and conventions. The satyr is beautiful and sensual, aggressive and lascivious. The satyr has no objective other than to show that the King is naked, and to achieve this he is willing to do anything, even lie. The satyr loves to play, because through play he makes fun of the world, desecrates the powerful and humiliates moralists. Instead of cold minimalism, the satyr prefers the idea of a marvellous standard, and in the concept of the series he sees only the eternal return of eternal violence, the melancholic perpetuation of an endless loop. The satyr is comic, but he does not do comedy: the satyr does not entertain the audience, he is not funny, he is not sociable, he is not conciliatory. The satyr is the exact opposite of the comedian: the satyr is antisocial, the satyr is pure poison. As Carmelo Bene used to say, "to make of one's misfortune a hilarious and deformed caricature, this is the comic that marries the sublime."

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On the level or the man who fell out of bed

This exhibition will be about perception, transformation and misunderstandings. I believe these are core elements of this year's topic of curated by, Comedy. On the level or the man who fell out of bed, deals with the reverse comprehension of language as a process that starts with knowing the sounds and images of words but not being able to understand their meaning, a bit like me and German language. This would be an ideal situation as Roland Barthes pouts it in his Éléments de sémiologie, a way to enter the magical world of the incomprehensible, like seeing something for the first time. In this context and from a certain point of view, everything can be perceived as elusive as possible and all things possibly can become projections of one self: the carnivalesque essence of life in all its glory, humankind at will. On the other hand and learning from the Ovidian concept of metamorphoses, one could argue that what we see as what it is, is what it has become, a transformation that gives form and meaning to what is there according to its past. In other words, the tragicomedy of life and the hilarious drama of the misunderstanding of what one should do in order to achieve what he wants.

In case of boredom, recite the ABC more often

In this year’s edition of the gallery festival curated by 2021, SPATZI SPEZIAL (Sophia Süßmilch and Valentin Wagner) will be curating an exhibition entitled “In case of boredom, recite the ABC more often”, embedding the festival’s theme “Comedy” into an artificial order. The decisive factor here is not the topic, chronology, quantities or the context of the works, but our alphabet with its artificial order of a finite number of objects. Alpha and omega. The duo SAPTZI SPEZIAL thus subvert the current forms of exhibition as well as reception. With this act of refusal, they merely seem to elude a certain discourse, just pretending not to play along – and they fail miserably. The original idea for this project is from Sophia Süßmilch’s video from 2011 entitled “In case of boredom, recite the ABC more often”, where the artist appears before the camera wearing a bee costume in Coney Island, New York, languidly reciting the ABC. When she is finished, she adds dryly: “Well, nothing much going on here” and leaves the picture. Well, we’re curious to see what will be going on at curated by 2021. If it’s boring, we can all just go home. The exhibition also extends into the small room at the back of the gallery. The room will be turned into a chamber of horrors as the artists dabble in a classic genre, namely clown portraits. The works by the participating artists move between cheerfulness and gloom and enjoy revealing the abysses of the human soul. For this exhibition, SPATZI SPEZIAL have invited artists who inspired them in their own works, including some well-known names, but also some hot new discoveries from the duo’s milieu.

A Sculpture in Search of an Author is an exhibition centered around an artwork by the Italian artist Emilio Prini (1943–2016). Or, rather, an artwork that may still be attributable to Emilio Prini. Or, perhaps more accurately, some materials that once constituted an artwork by Emilio Prini, that he has since removed his name from. Or: there exists, in storage, some materials that were once exhibited under the authorship of Emilio Prini, but now could be considered a disowned artwork by Emilio Prini, or considered some materials that, while once being combined to make an artwork by Emilio Prini are now simply materials with a notable history. We may call it a sculpture in search of an author. Emilio Prini is one of those artists around whom stories and legends proliferate; oftentimes these legends have become as present as the work itself, especially as they often involve the negation of the works that occasion them. This is one of those stories. As it goes, in 2011 Prini made a new sculptural work, titled Da Fermacarta, to be included in the Artissima art fair in Turin in the booth of Galleria Lorcan O’Neill, Rome. On the second day of the fair, as negotiations for its acquisition by a major Italian museum were well underway, Prini’s assistant arrived at the fair and demanded its immediate removal on the grounds that Prini rescinded authorship of the work. No reason was given. For the past ten years, these materials, once an exhibited sculpture by a legendary artist, have sat in the gallery’s storage, its status in the world uncertain, in stasis, hollowed. In the spirit of Luigi Pirandello’s 1921 absurdist play Six Characters in Search of an Author, Studio for Propositional Cinema has invited several artists to respond to the uncertain ontological status of this sculpture, or ex-sculpture, creating a tentative play of statements on and demonstrations of the roles and potential roles of the artist-author in relation to their autonomy over the reception, distribution, construction, and completion of their work.

Camouflage

In times of Corona, which can certainly be met with bitter humor, the festival Curated by in September 2021 is dedicated to the topic of Comedy. The exhibition contribution Camouflage at Meyer Kainer gallery takes up certain subversive and ironic aspects of the late work of Francis Picabia and takes them as the starting point for a specific observation of selected contemporary art positions that defy clear definition. However, the show does not aim to get involved in the current modes of comedy culture as they are constantly appearing in various forms in today's media. Wikipedia does not offer a clear definition of the term “camouflage”. In general, it means the use of camouflage patterns in military or fashion, if one disregards the fact that some artists such as Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons had already appropriated the deceptive surfaces for the transformation of objects. The starting point of the exhibition is a painting by Francis Picabia from the 1940s, which despite its comedy, touches with its intensity and depth. The French painter used a black and white photograph as a template for this “portrait of a stranger”, which was shown in a popular men's magazine. The transfer into color gives the motif a strange appearance, as Picabia increases the contrast of light and dark areas, whereby the initial realism of the original is evaporated. The result is a pastiche of technical and painterly processes, whereby the ironic intention unmistakably remains. The focus of the process is less an interest in art history than a fascination with ambiguity and camouflage. A work full of irony, yet born of tragedy, sensitivity, and devotion, which ultimately embodies deep seriousness. These and other properties of Picabia’s image contrast the intention of the theme of Comedy as a genre, as in a similar sense, the other, also artificial and hybrid exhibition contributions in Camouflage, are dedicated to a complex game of subtle contexts. Regardless of how the intentions of the participating artists are influenced by Picabia's strategies, the tension between the two positions remains stimulating for Camouflage. A publication will accompany the exhibition.

From...To...

Galerie nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder is glad to announce a solo exhibition by Chinese artist Zhang Peili (*1957, Hangzhou). With a selection of works bridging the last thirty years of his practice, the show presents, how Zhang reacts to and reflects on the socio-political fabric of present-day’s global society from-out China. In the exhibition, a selection of Zhang’s early epochal video works produced between 1988 and 1996 is echoed by excerpts of a recent project which is premiered in Europe, namely the full scan of the artists’ skeleton, organs, and body data into marble, travertine, white onyx, along with further translations of individual data and information into representations. This literal “body of work” is questioning the global status of the individual in the same way as it makes use of cutting-edge technology of all sorts.

The (Divine) Comedy or The Spell as Art Practice

MIDWAY upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost. – La Divina Commedia, Inferno, Canto I

Lost, I was. Then, Julia, Bruce, Gabriele, Booze and Prince came my way. The (Divine) Comedy brings your best dreams and worst nightmares together. Your life is the stage, you won the Oscar for the Best Supporting Role. Julia Goodman, Bruce LaBruce, Gabriele Edlbauer Booze on Boobs, and Prince Richard have something in common, something crucial, something that can only be revealed, understood and misunderstood, by stepping into The (Divine) Comedy.

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Erschreckend aktuell | Frighteningly topical

Berlin-based couple Jörg Heiser and Sarah Khan have long been concerned with comedy and humor in art, literature, and film. Because humor can be a method of exposure (indecent or not), just as exposure is a method of humor, the theme of the show was to be narrowed down to forms of “genital comedy.” “Genital comedy” was then also initially the working title. Nudity, body taboos, gender characteristics, and gender oddities no longer seem to be topics that contemporary artists want to deal with intensively or comprehensively. The de-tabooization and the permanent commercial use of body characteristics, especially female ones, seemingly leaves little room to approach the subject in an interesting way. What strategies and responses have yet to be consumed in this field? And what self-statements do artists risk when they turn to the subject?

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Too Close To Home

Once upon a time, we drifted into the night. It always comes back to night. In the dark, we are more equal: a myth I will buy. In the dark, we can be more interchangeable. Here and there, we bump into an object or a body. Sometimes I can’t tell the difference. The best bodies I’ve known are the ones who can play the nicest objects. To say we gave up would be to say there is no future. Yet kids surround us—and so we pass the torch. I’ve recently learned that “contemporary” is not a vacuum; contemporary only means post-war. All along, I had thought of it as an intractable abyss, from which a never-ending sameness would engulf all sense of time, context, and direction. In the backroom, Steve McQueen’s Hunger plays silently. Resistance, the kids learn, is played out on screens. In the flowering of virtual space, bodies ascend to empty 2D signifiers for companies and their woke opposition alike.

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One day it will be like when we´ve already lived

„Life is but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." (William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act V, Scene V).

In this exhibition, the artists explore, each in their own way, one of the innumerable facets of the great human Comedy. Self-proclaimed "artist of mediocrity" (but is not mediocre who wants to), Jacques Lizène stages himself in many ways, in often hybrid artworks of which some reappear as remake several years he does not hesitate to produce "remakes" several years later. Here Lizène is appealing to all lovers of good taste: "Collectors, you must acquire a mediocre artwork by Lizène to highlight your furniture and your stylish masterpieces!". 

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PUT A SOCK IN IT! explores the relationships between comedy, power, ethics, sexuality, and desire, coming to the conclusion that comedy produces spaces of disidentification, and that it can turn hegemony on its head by never upholding the status quo. Afterall, who and what is considered funny or what is seen as humorless is defined by structural hierarchies. Why is one told to put a sock in it? You’ll either get it, or you won’t.

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eureka!

The French philosopher Henri Bergson, in a collection of essays published at the beginning of the last century, identifies the essential requirements of comedy: it is inextricably linked to the human being; it needs a momentary distancing from the source of hilarity; and it is a phenomenon that cannot ignore sociality. Even when one laughs in solitude, one laughs in community. Comedy occurs, according to Bergson, when we are faced with behaviors that signal automatism, distraction, or insouciance. Imitations amuse when they reflect mechanical aspects of the imitated, which is then reborn as a double camouflage, like a puppet. The comedic moment, therefore, is a moment of rupture that highlights the mechanical taking over some possibilities of life. eureka! takes its cue from these reflections, reflecting procedures of comedy via works that manifest a disjunction with respect to the literal appearance that solidifies the personal or sociopolitical concerns that informed them. Similarly, the exhibition looks at comedy tactics—false clues, double entendre, hyperbole, circularity, puns, refrains—building a path that articulates different artistic practices in a narrative whose ultimate goal is not laughter. Like a story that mimics a frozen joke, but which—programmatically—doesn’t seek a release effect.

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HARDCORE FREEDOM & The First Supper

For the 2021 edition of Curated by, upon invitation of Zeller von Almsick, The Performance Agency is pleased to announce a twofold program of excesses.

HARDCORE FREEDOM, by Esben Weile Kjaer (*1992, Denmark) The scenery of HARDCORE FREEDOM is activated twice a day on the opening weekend: Seven performers shift, erect and demolish elements over the course of an immersive score carried by a frenzied soundscape, oscillating between rebellion and depression. The audience becomes part of this hybrid space at the crossroads of nightclub, art institution, stage and fashion boutique. Esben Weile Kjær unravels popular culture’s commercial narratives of youth and freedom, which became identity markers for a whole generation of millenials. With strategies borrowed from the experience economy, HARDCORE FREEDOM casts an inquisitive and critical eye on its ideals: anxiety, nostalgia, sampling of symbols, digital self-invention and cultural consumption. The project marks the first presentation of Esben Weile Kjær’s work in Austria. Please bring drinks with you.

The First Supper, Caique Tizzi (*1984, Brazil) On both days, the performances are followed by a staged dinner conceived by artist Caique Tizzi. The First Supper explores the cosmogonies of food and the potential performativity of a meal within a shared space of experience. Cosmogony stands for the origin —the creation of the gods and of the universe, the storytelling of how the world came into existence. Tizzi picked amongst the narratives of different founding myths elements related to the consumption of food and divided his dinner into four chapters and courses. Every course is accompanied by the reading of a text or a song, guiding the guests through an ever-changing present.

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