Veranstaltungen

 27.05.2023

Rosalyn D’Mello

Vinagr: Fermenting the Multitude

For the first iteration of the series, we are hosting Rosalyn D’Mello on Saturday May 27th , from
4pm to 7pm.

Rosalyn is a feminist writer, art critic, columnist, essayist, editor and researcher currently based in the
Italian Alps. She is the author of A Handbook for My Lover. She writes a weekly feminist column for
“mid-day”, and a monthly memoir-based art column on contemporary art for “STIR”. She was a fellow
at Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen (2021-22), an Ocean Fellowship Mentor (2021), and the recipient of
an India Foundation for the Arts research grant (2019-2022). Her writing has been internationally
published and anthologised. She is represented by David Godwin Associates.
At Villa Romana, Rosalyn presents Vinagr: Fermenting the Multitude, a feminist exploration of
transgenerational culinary practices. The performance lecture situates itself in the realm of a kitchen
alongside the active preparation of poie, a Goan bread that is itself a product of syncretism, rooted in
Goa’s centuries-long occupation by the Portuguese. As the yeast ferments, D’Mello will share her
embodied reflections on acts of citation and translation within the immigrant kitchen, centering it as a
site of metabolic discourse, study and experimentation. How does a substance enter a kitchen? What
substitutions and transformations are made in improvised spaces? How do socio-political contexts
and conditions influence the availability of ingredients and their synthesis into a culinary language? If
we consider the recipe as an artefact translated across geographies and temporalities through oral or
written formats or simply through the method of physical demonstration, what are the ensuing
implications on the concept of authenticity? Can the written recipe be regarded as instructive art? Can
the oral recipe summon ancestral spirits?

The project is realised with the contribution of the Fondazione CR Firenze.

zurück