Food is highly charged with meaning and affect. It is highly political and performative. Food has served as inspiration and has been the subject of countless works of art. My area of research is food in performance art. I approach food from theoretical and also artistic knowledge production points of view. I would like to present what are some of the parameters of food as a medium in performance and also recall or touch upon its use in several pieces of what I call “food performances”. In these pieces, using food, the artists’ goals range from experimenting with nontraditional materials to bridging the distance between art and life, to talking about body issues or environmental concerns. The work so far in this field has shown that there are numerous strategies and motivations for performing with food. This research will provide insights to understand the overlapping and common articulation of food in performance, by answering the main question of “What are the dimensions, parameters, and possible use strategies of food as a medium in performance?” with several sub-questions, such as “How can one articulate and develop a performance practice based on food as an aesthetic medium? How can one use food to develop affective and critical performance encounters? How can food notions and knowledge be applied in order to facilitate new performances? How did other performers use food in their performance practices? Are there any common strategies or clusters? Is there even such a genre as ‘food performance’?” In an attempt to build a more coherent understanding of food in performance, I started a practice-based research program on food and performance with food as a medium in 2013. The project took place at a.pass in Brussels, a post-master program focused on performance and scenography studies. Following the successful completion of the a.pass program in 2014, I continued to produce food art performance pieces, constructed with the constant underlying intent of artistic research. Most of them are archived online at www.performingfood.com. I have worked both alone and in collaboration on topics related to the politics of food, to food and memory, as well as to food and gender. I continue to follow the research and general output on the topic, as well as further courses and conferences. Examples from my artistic practice, such as the “Looking for oneself” performance presented in the Matera Capital of Culture Program will also be used to show how food is helping to produce knowledge about artistic practice and performance art.
Rareş Augustin Crăiuţ is an artist-researcher, performer, chef and civil society activist. He studied theatre in Romania at the Babes-Bolyai University and performance and artistic research at a.pass in Brussels. His work is mostly related to food and performance; the possibilities opened up to developing new modes of eating and new ways of perceiving food from a responsible perspective. Since 2013, Rares has worked on developing a food and performance artistic research entitled “performing food”, examining the consumption of food from both material and conceptual points of view through artistic experimentation and cuisine. To this date, “performing food” has shaped a whole series of performances on food and memory, especially the geopolitics of hunger in the last decade of socialist Romania and the series on food and post-truth politics, with a particular focus on falsifying the food memoir and personal identity. Since 2017, he is enrolled in the doctoral research program of the Faculty of Theatre and Television of the Babes Bolyai Univesity in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. Within this program, he is conducting grounded theory research on food as a medium in performance art.