Nico takes Alina by the hand, leads her to pick up a plate with some cheese, and accompanies her to sit around the fire. Then he takes Cristina by the hand, they pick a tomato from the garden, and he leads her to sit around the fire. And so it goes for Cosmin, with a piece of wood, and for Marius with a piece of slanina. A bundle of feathers rests on a log, waiting for the hands that will bring it into the scene. In the background, a wooden table and a rolled-up cloth. Thus begins the final moment of the research sharing, the culmination of the work carried out by Angiuli during his residency at Intersectia, involving some of the people he met along the way.
His research unfolded through a flow of encounters and reflections that led to a performance as the emergent moment of an experience of the landscape.
The artist entered into dialogue with the context, allowing himself to be carried by emotional derives, seeking to attune with a territory undergoing change. He identified local food production, maintained both by small-scale farmers and producers, as well as in the private sphere, as a radical expression of resistance capable of opposing globalizing forces that impose new ways of producing and consuming, defining a distance between what we produce, what we eat, and ultimately who we are.
Nico gathers, tastes, chews, introjects places, flavors, knowledges, elements encountered, gifted, touched, licked, eaten, and then re-presented on stage, composing a table arranged like a living still life.
The outcome of this research is not a representation of a place, but a presentation of some of the elements that constitute it, reworked through the body and the fire in a performative action, an alchemical ritual of transmutation and regeneration that invites us to reflect on ce arde (“what burns”), on what is lost, but also on what endures and transforms.
CE ARDE
Performance
Hay, milk, manure, slănină, tomatoes, eggs, cheese, salt stone, sour cherries, apple preserves, wood, feathers, fire, chewed coal on cotton cloth.
Thanks to the local producers and people involved in the research process:
Mazăre Farm
Gheorghe Muntean
Iosif Zbarcea
Cristina Sporea
Marius and Aura Banciu
Produced and curated by Intersecţia (Emanuela Ascari)
In collaboration with the Italian Cultural Institute in Bucharest.
