Celebrations: it’s often the party*—not the dinner itself Event

Celebrations seeks to start conversation about our differences, backgrounds and beliefs by intersecting, comparing and contrasting one another’s stories using the comfortable and quotidian element of a meal. The exhibition features a series of carefully crafted dinner performances, shared meals and their residues, all revolving around ingredients offered by the soil and narratives offered by participants, which together conjure experiences of (dis)connection from the ground, what grows just above or below it, as well as our (dis)connection from the Other. Drawing from Wong’s research on non-verbal communication and hospitality, the artist not only offers handmade food to participants, but in a way, allows himself to be consumed by others, with the hope guests will replicate the experience for themselves.

THE EXHIBITION
Developed as part of the artist’s Celebrations series, It’s often the party*—not the dinner itself is conceived as a threefold project: research, performance, and installation.

As research, the project continues to study the act of eating and how different forms of communication are established through eating together where commonality is confronted with the idea of the self and the other outside the limits contemplated by phenomenology, and with the intention of creating common grounds of understanding. With this in mind, we will use the ground itself and what grows beneath or right above it, not as our main focus, but as our point of departure.

Carrots, onions, turmeric and radishes; ginger, beets, garlic and turnips, all root vegetables, the most common of them: potatoes, but little over 500 years ago potatoes were not nearly as recognized as they are today. Imported to Europe from what is now Perú and Bolivia in the mid 1500s, potatoes were a product that was virtually ignored until times of scarcity and famine in various European cities. The resilient character of the root brought attention to it, making it possible to feed people in hospitals, the working class people, armies, etc. It was not until the late 1800s that the potato changed from a broadly unappreciated produce item to a normalized part of European cuisine, incorporated into dishes regardless of socioeconomic class and/or acquisitive power. In contrast, potatoes, in their place of origin, were a precious good used for sustenance and a means of exchange for other products related to the idea of community amongst peoples with vast knowledge about the soil, cultivation of the land for food production, and different techniques of storing and preserving the roots.

The project will make use of some of these techniques of cooking and preserving potatoes and other roots in a pragmatic way—by performing them in the traditional sense, and in a metaphorical way—by reflecting on the historiographies associated with recipes such as Tiroler Gröstl and Peruvian Carapulcra, as the result of migration processes. The information and/or findings from the research will be displayed as a sculptural object intersecting the aesthetics of a recipe book with that of an ethnographic research in the anteroom; whilst the dinner/performance will be registered in video from a centered zenital plane above the table in the main room of the gallery.

As a performance, the dinners are designed as three distince events with a similar performative narrative, but each with a different main dish from which the other courses of food will be prepared. The guests, selected through an open call for each dinner, are to engage with the performance first by removing their shoes and socks and walking onto the soil, and second, by taking one of the 21 seats around the table as marked by hay-like-padded cushions.

Tiles on the table will serve as plates and three courses of food will be served, the temperature of which will vary from cold to warm through the performance in order to resemble the organic evolution of the encounters in between strangers during the event. The first course will consist of individual and cold Entrées, the second will be a hot platter of food which will be passed around and shared in between the guests, finally moving to an assortment of pastries in uneven and limited quantities to be given from one to the other in a horizontal exchange.

THE ARTIST
Ramiro Wong

Born in Peru and based in Vienna, Ramiro Wong is a transdisciplinary artist working with topics of identity politics, migration and othering through what he calls Dynamics of displacement, aesthetics of othering. With prior studies in construction engineering and over ten year of experience in the film industry, the artist approaches art through the languages of installation and performance as tools for immersive communication.

The artist does not attempt to trick, but to confront, not to hook, but to echo the reality in which we live—one that seems to be invisible to the naked eye—and for this the processes of research, documentation and reinterpretation of cultural phenomena can be witnessed from the deliberate choice of material, the specific mediums employed and the open discourse that accompanies the artworks, all of which are just the starting point for what interests the artist: the conversations and reactions when in presence of the work.

Since 2014, the artist has actively engaged in collaborative projects such as Aerosolar with Thomas Saraceno, as well as other forms of community based art in Austria and Peru. He has exhibited in the Museum of Art Lima (MALI), Qorikancha Museum in Cusco-Peru, and 21er Haus Museum, and has taken part in the Lima Art Biennial, Parallel, as well as other group shows in galleries such as Krinzinger Schottenfeld and others in Austria.

Currently, Wong is working in close collaboration with An(other) South+, an art platform for artists from the Global South and other projects that try to bring balance to the mechanisms of marginalization that art and artists outside the West-North have to endure.