A Remote Celebration of the 10th Anniversary of the journal p-e-r-f-o-r-m-a-n-c-e
Saturday 1 March, from Noon to 3 PM (EST)
https://chapman.zoom.us/j/92013039956
The journal p-e-r-f-o-r-m-a-n-c-e was founded in Fall 2014 by Ivan Magrin-Chagnolleau. The initial idea was to create a vehicle for art theory and practice to meet, for untypical forms of art research to coexist with more traditional essays about art, and to provide a place for various artistic approaches to meet. The eighth volume on Art and Ethics is on its way, and the whole team of the journal is very proud of all the volumes published so far. This work wouldn’t have been possible without all the people who contributed one way or another to the journal: co-editors, authors, reviewers, and members of the scientific committee. We wanted to celebrate all these people by organizing online webinars around the topics of each published volume and to actualize those topics. These webinars will be the opportunity to meet again and measure together the road traveled and the road ahead. Today we shall be focusing on the Cuisine & Performance issue, which appeared in 2017, conceived and co-edited (with Ivan Magrin-Chagnolleau) by Allen S. Weiss.
Program:
Ivan Magrin-Chagnolleau, “Welcome”
Allen S. Weiss, “A modest proposal to eliminate culinary adjectives”
Max Shrem, “Munch, Mirth, and Media: Grimod’s Gourmet Game”
Savinien Caracostea, “Is it Cake? Thinking about Pastries Past, Present, and Future”
Diane Borsato, “ORCHARD, Mushroom Forays, and Tea Practice”
Athena Stourna, “Researching the Table, the Kitchen and the Stage: An Autobiographical Approach”
Tim Waterman, “Dining at a Distance (Post-Lockdown)”
Yael Raviv, “Broken: Culinary Performance and National Politics”
Participants:
Diane Borsato, “ORCHARD, Mushroom Forays, and Tea Practice”
Diane Borsato will present three projects: ORCHARD (2019-ongoing), a community orchard featuring rare apple varietals as public art; Mushroom Forays (2014-ongoing), where she leads mushroom foraging sessions to expand perception and connection with nature; and Tea Practice (2024-ongoing), involving repeated rituals of brewing and sharing tea in various outdoor environments and weather conditions.
Diane Borsato is an award-winning artist, amateur mycologist, orchardist and beekeeper who works closely with other artists and naturalists. She has performed and exhibited her social, site-responsive and environmental art projects at museums and galleries across Canada and internationally. She is also co-editor with Amish Morrell of Outdoor School: Contemporary Environmental Art (2021), and author of MUSHROOMING: The Joy of the Quiet Hunt (2022) a guide to foraging fungi in contemporary art. She is Associate Professor of Experimental Studio at the University of Guelph, and lives in Toronto. See her work at: www.dianeborsato.net
Savinien Caracostea, “Is it Cake? Thinking about Pastries Past, Present, and Future”
Pastries have long been more than just food; they are expressions of culture, desire, and creativity, evolving from simple sustenance to elaborate and performative works of art. Drawing inspiration from the viral “Is it Cake?” videos and architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown’s “duck” or “decorated shed” dichotomy, this talk will survey the contemporary state of pastry and pose the question: What is the pastry of the future?
Savinien Caracostea is a kaleidoscopic creative, working at the intersection of design, culture & technology. He brings his expertise in graphic, spatial, editorial and culinary design to imagine, generate and activate the commercial and leisure spaces of tomorrow. In addition to consulting international brands on creative strategy and innovation, he publishes a magazine on dreams, builds giant pastry installations, and started a think-tank exploring the future of hospitality. He has degrees in Architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and Cornell University, and a degree in Pastry Arts from the French Culinary Institute.
Ivan Magrin-Chagnolleau, Moderator
Ivan Magrin-Chagnolleau is an artist philosopher who has been involved in art making as well as academic research and teaching for many years. He is affiliated with Chapman University in California. His current interests include: the creative process and its phenomenology, art and philosophy, artificial intelligence and creativity, art and spirituality, art and environment. Ivan can be found online at: ivanhereandnow.com | @ivanhereandnow
Yael Raviv, “Broken: Culinary Performance and National Politics”
My 2016 piece for p-e-r-f-o-r-m-a-n-c-e attempted to complicate the connection between food and nationhood through a study of Israeli and Palestinian food-centered performances. In this presentation, I welcome an opportunity to reflect on that work in light of the new, post October 7 reality and the new, post October 7 me, while also exploring the intersection of food and nationhood more broadly. With the current rise of nationalist movements and tall fences across the world, what insights, actions or cautionary tales can performance work offer?
Yael Raviv is the COO of the non-profit organization Jewish Food Society. She is the author of Falafel Nation: Cuisine and the Making of National Identity in Israel (2015) and numerous articles on food and culture. Yael received her PhD from NYU Tisch School’s Department of Performance Studies, and subsequently taught at NYU’s Nutrition and Food Studies Department and still teaches at The University of Gastronomic Sciences in Bra, Italy. She founded and helmed the non-profit Umami food and art festival through 2020.
Max Shrem, “Munch, Mirth, and Media: Grimod’s Gourmet Game”
This talk revisits Grimod de La Reynière as a proto-food influencer in the 21st century sense. Through his famous meals, widely circulated invitations, and appearances in Parisian gossip columns, Grimod mastered the use of mass media to shape public perception of taste and dining. His Almanach des gourmands not only pioneered restaurant reviews but also cemented his role as an early architect of food culture, blending spectacle, social disruption, and culinary critique to influence his era—much like today’s influencers shape ours.
Max Shrem is a writer, translator, and scholar of French food culture. He earned his PhD in French literature from NYU, writing on Grimod de La Reynière, the first restaurant critic. He has lectured at Brown, Bucknell, and Notre Dame on terroir and the Michelin Guide and designed food-focused courses at NYU Paris and Boston University. A cheese expert, Max has written articles for Men’s Journal and contributed entries to the Oxford Companion to Cheese. In the early 2000s, he interviewed over 100 American cheesemakers for AOL’s now-defunct food blog Slashfood. He also spent five years as a seasonal cheesemonger at Paris-based Fromagerie Trotté, where he helped age and sell cheeses. On March 20, 2025, he will speak at the French National Assembly on Roquefort’s growing popularity in the U.S. for its AOC centennial.
Athena Stourna, “Researching the Table, the Kitchen and the Stage: An Autobiographical Approach”
This presentation will follow my research on food in performance in the last ten years, through an autobiographical approach. I will discuss how the scope of my research has evolved through a series of crises – personal, social, financial and sanitary, focusing on the table and the kitchen as spaces of performance.
Athena Stourna is a scenographer, theatre and performance maker and researcher. She is Assistant Professor of Space, Scenography and Performance in the Department of Performing and Digital Arts of the University of the Peloponnese. Her research and artistic practice focus on performance space and design, as well as in the relationship between food, drink and cooking with theatre and performance. She is the author of the monograph La Cuisine à la scène : boire et manger au théâtre du XXe siècle (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2011).
Tim Waterman, “Dining at a Distance (Post-Lockdown)”
The forms of digital and remote conviviality and commensality explored in the original paper “Dining at a Distance: Performing the Commons Across Space and Time” became urgent and necessary through the COVID lockdowns, and the software and platforms available moved swiftly during that time to meet those needs. The opportunity now exists to reflect on whether the emancipatory potential and commons creation of ‘telematic dining’ and the further hybrid forms of physical and digital togetherness were in any way realised, and to see what opportunities might have been missed.
Tim Waterman is Professor of Landscape Theory at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. His research addresses imaginaries: moral, political, social, ecological, radical, and utopian. This forms the basis for explorations of power and democracy and their shaping of public space and public life, taste and manners, and foodways in community and civic life and landscape. He is the author of The Landscape of Utopia: Writings on Everyday Life, Taste, Democracy, and Design and editor of Landscape Citizenships with Ed Wall and Jane Wolff, Landscape and Agency: Critical Essays with Ed Wall, and the Routledge Handbook of Landscape and Food with Joshua Zeunert. He is at work on a tetralogy of short books in landscape philosophy, the first of which is titled Reworlding: Planetarity and Future Imaginaries.
Allen S. Weiss, “A modest proposal to eliminate culinary adjectives”
Much writing concerning food and wine is sheer nonsense. Hence this plea for precision, reflection, care – and the abolition of adjectives – in culinary discourse.
Allen S. Weiss conceived and co-edited the issue of p-e-r-f-o-r-m-a-n-c-e on gastronomy. He is the author and editor of over forty books in the fields of performance theory, landscape architecture, gastronomy, sound art and experimental theater. His books on gastronomy include Feast and Folly: Cuisine, Intoxication, and the Poetics of the Sublime; Comment cuisiner un phénix; Autobiographie dans un chou farci; and Métaphysique de la miette. His most recent books are Illusory Dwellings, an essay on Kyoto culture, and Unpacking My Library, or, The Autobiography of Teddy, the tale of his beloved Teddy bear. He is Distinguished Teacher in the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University.