A recipe for rethinking consumption, not as a private indulgence but as a collective act of care, for the bodies and ecologies that sustain us.
Surplus-Taste invites us to enter a kaleidoscopic feast of consumption, where food is no longer sustenance but spectacle, a shimmering mirage of desires and contradictions. In this multi-channel video installation, the tourist dreamscape of Italy’s culinary heritage is reimagined as a carnival of overstimulation. It is a provocation, a satire and an appeal to disentangle ourselves from the aesthetics of taste.
Here, the ‘authentic’ is unmasked as a hologram, a construct born of capitalism’s hunger for perfection and its incessant need to exhibit tradition. The screens clash and blur, vying for your gaze like rival taverns on a cobbled street, each one shouting in vivid tones: Look! Taste! Believe!
In this surreal landscape of food without food, Surplus-Taste pushes us to confront the bonds we have established with consumption. Are we in communion with the Earth, with the hands that knead dough and the soil that gives birth to grain, or simply seduced by shiny surfaces that promise more than they can deliver?
The installation asks what it means to be responsible to the ecologies of our appetites. It does not reproach, but winks, laughs ‘seriously’ and turns the absurdity of our excess into a strange and bittersweet mirror.
In a world where the material substance of food is devoured by its symbolic glitter, Surplus-Taste reminds us that kinship begins with noticing. Noticing what we eat, what we desire and what we ignore.