Històries Trobades

Participative Performance.
El Penedés, Spain. 2022

In Històries trobades – the Catalan translation of “finding stories” – we investigate parts of homemade food’s formal vocabulary to tell a person’s story. The experience is motivated by how a particular Catalan woman cooks the traditional dish “Fricando.” We wanted to find portrait-like elements in the way she prepared, served and experienced this dish. Hence, we conceptualised this diner as a portrait. For this process, we drew parallels between the formal structure of Neoclassic or Baroque portraits and storyfinding narratives. We created a dinner with numerous layered symbolic elements that the diner/spectator found during the experience. This structure allowed the spectator to build their own dynamic narratives oscillating between class issues, women’s liberation, feminism and identity.

Photo credits: Molly Steele, Jose Hopkins Brocq and Yoyo Balagué.

Performer sitting away from the table

From left to right: Intervention on the Allegory of the Spanish Republic image
by Tomas Padró Pedret and Fricandò Recipe

From left to right: Napkin Wrapper and A short Masterclass of the First Catalan Lady video

Quote on the napkin:

“The women’s world is divided, just as is the world of men, into two camps; the interests and aspirations of one group of women bring it close to the bourgeois class, while the other group has close connections with the proletariat, and its claims for liberation encompass a full solution to the woman question. Thus, although both camps follow the general slogan of the “liberation of women”, their aims and interests are different. Each of the groups unconsciously takes its starting point from the interests of its own class, which gives a specific class colouring to the targets and tasks it sets itself. [Alexandra Kollontai (1909)]”