Images from the food ritual archive

Images from the food ritual archive: someone´s well-mannered handling of a chronology of cutlery; someone´s neatly curled locks of hair hovering above the plates, being served a portion of homogenous, translucent fluid contained by a porcelain bowl; someone in a plant-patterned blouse, with polished nails, cutting into a salad (the black and white footage, with its un-greenness of the salad, making the salad less salad-y), depicting the plant and wearing the plant and eating it too, dressing the salad; somebody in a tweed jacket twirling noodles around a fork; somebody putting out their cigarette on the cheese platter; a folded napkin like an origami space shuttle on a clean plate.

The ethos ascribed to the composed equipment – the tablecloth its canvas – suggesting the order of the upcoming meal; suggesting, even, an order of the digestive process, a line up of well-behaved inner organs folding and unfolding, performing together within that patterned blouse. There´s an evolutionary privilege to containing a smaller digestive tract than other primates of our size; of spending a lot less time chewing those tough, unheated substances. Imagine those ancestors through the generations, moving central parts of the food processing to the outside of bodies; rather more applying the elements, treating edibles with fire and water, all the while retaining a gut, albeit perhaps continuously shrinking, leaving behind appendixes, making room for the brain, making time for napkin folding and cutlery adjusting and hair curling.

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Maria L. Willassen (1985) is a freelance writer/artist and currently works at Hordaland Art Centre in Bergen.

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The earth has one moon and more or less fourteen billion index fingers. This obvious disproportion gives a greater moral value to the moon than to a finger in the trade of attentions, superstitions and attitudes.

Wrote with the index finger of my left hand

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Andrea Spreafico is a Bergen based artist, writer and philosopher.