open kitchen

As a guest of the international gastronomic event The Flemish Primitives, FoAM will present a sneak preview of the Open Sauces book.

http://www.theflemishprimitives.com/

Rethinking Food #2

FoAM, a cross-disciplinary, trans-local laboratory and the artist Kate Rich complicate the equation of food miles. This meal is prepared with products and ingredients freighted in from around the globe, in the spare luggage space of social and cultural travellers.

Feral Trade is a grocery business trading outside commercial systems. Goods hitchhike on other sources of movement, often using the art world as an energy source, harnessing the surplus freight potential of the many journeys logged by artists, curators and audiences to move grocery items intercity.

FoAM and the Guild for Reality Integrators and Generators invite you to a synaesthetic dinner, to jointly sample, celebrate and debate the future of food.

Food is a nutritious and delectable product of our reciprocal, sustaining relationship with the environment. It is also one of the oldest cultural expressions, rooted in hospitality and sharing. As the gastronome Brilliat-Savarin noted three centuries ago, “the discovery of a new dish does more for human happiness than the discovery of a new star.”

Kate Rich will introduce Feral Trade (http://feraltrade.org), serve ferally traded tea & coffee & conduct a raffle of the Feral Trade Hamper, a seasonal selection of goods sourced and transported over social networks.

Bernard Lahousse, an internationally renown food scientist, one of the founders of CREAX Food (http://creaxfood.com/) & consultant to creative chefs worldwide (in Belgium: L'air du temps, Oud Sluis, In de wulf, Kasteel Withof,...) will prepare a nutritious lecture on food pairing, molecular gastronomy and new kitchen techiques. Bernard will talk about the concepts of coupling and replacing ingredients based on their chemical components. He will explain how to use his food pairing website (http://www.foodpairing.be) and introduce "The Flemish Primitives" (http://www.theflemishprimitives.com/).

Edible Perfume is a hands-on workshop on extracting and composing aromas & flavours, inspired by the concept of flavour pairing.

The workshop is led by Maki Ueda (http://scent-lab.blogspot.com/), assisted by Nik Gaffney (FoAM).

A natural smell is often extracted from a material using chemistry techniques for retrieving essential oils, such as distillation, ethanol extraction, or oil maceration. In the Edible Perfume workshop, these techniques will be adopted in the kitchen.

Semiotics of the Kitchen Radio (Verbindingen/Jonctions 11.4)
by Constant

Saturday November 15, 15:00 (doors open: 14:30)
FoAM, Koolmijnenkaai 30-34 Brussels and on-line

With Martha Rosler’s classic performative alphabet 'Semiotics of the Kitchen' as a point of departure, Constants' design collective Open Source Publishing (OSP) presents a live radio broadcast from the FoAM kitchen. Experimenting with the displacement of multi sensory experiences, they reflect on the preparation and distribution of food as metaphor, structure, vocabulary and rhythm.

A variety of activities will be served from FoAM's kitchen, including a workshop on scent extraction by Maki Ueda, presentation on food-pairing by Bernard Lahousse, Kitchen-radio by Constant, a conversation about 'public diets' of Brussels-based arts organisations, a tea-party & feral-trade hamper raffle by Kate Rich, ending on the 22nd of November with the grand "Open Sauces, On food and coding", where we will attempt to demystify the production, distribution, presentation and consumption of food in a degustation dinner, with matched artists, scientists and other trans-local food enthusiasts.

Recipes for Disaster
A feasibility dinner for sustained sustenance...

Artists, cultural organisations and members of the assorted cultural proletariat are invited to a potluck dinner and round table conversation on nutrition, catering and survival in the art world and the cultural sphere.