Stomach It

Artist's menu, performance



2017









In a performance integrated into the opening reception for Space Force Construction, uniformed servers offer guests dishes on the politics of food: edible paper, two carrots wrapped in a poem bya Bolshevik poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, bread made from flour of dried leaves and hay, a lollipop in the shape of Lenin’s head, and a loudspeaker on a plate with sounds of hungry stomachs. All lead to a kind of kinaesthetic time travel, evoking the pain of hunger experienced by millions who suffered starvation and death because of Soviet policies, especially in the 1930s in Ukraine and the Caucasus. Taus Makhacheva, whose family roots are in the Avar ethnic group of the Caucasus, makes expressive performance and media works that illuminate recent historical conditions of life in her ancestral region.
                    
— Peter Taub

                    
I take a timeline as a starting point; I take a point on that timeline as a starting point. A sound your body rarely makes, the intimacy of sharing when there is little left to share. You listen to me, you try to stomach it, stomach the past in your present gut. Who started this, who shapes this history, what shape do the brains take in your mouth. Changing numbers on bread coupons, a test of how little one needs to be able to lift a finger. Can you even swallow meat made from newspaper, soup made from wallpaper paste. Can you swallow that past, a past bereft of choice. Do we even mention cannibalism here, do we even mention the historical facts of famine and cannibalism caused by the state. Is this how your plate would have looked. It’s a line, it’s a small boat, I travel across the water into the past, dishes float by, I catch something every now and then with a net, I take it out for you to swallow.






Team

Performers

Costume design

Sound design

Visualisation

Objects production

Costume production

Smell

Food

Candy mold production

Candy wrapper

Graphic design

Production

Research

Translation

Photo



Greta Gerosa, Manuela Kokanovic, Akiko Kusayanagi, Nina Nina, Margherita Mezzetti, Carlotta Pansa, Carolina Pozzi, Maria Giovanna Zanella,  
Panika Derevya

Alexander Khokhlov

Voploschator

Make Fabrication Studio

Svetlana Kondrasheva, Olga Kostornova, Irina Olezhkina, Svetlana Shcherbakova, 
Ilya Nastenko

I Figli delle Stelle

Ledenfab

CNC Machine

Zaven

Malika Alieva, Kamila Banks, Nadya Gorbushina, Jamilya Valieva, 
Malika Alieva, Kamila Banks, Jamilya Valieva

Evgeny Bonver

Andrea Penisto


Special thanks:
Svetlana Anokhina, Katerina Chuchalina, Carlos Noronha Feio, Patrick Hough, Anna Ilchenko, Maria Isserlis, Daria Kirsanova, Magomed Magomedov, Greta Mavica, Magomed Piramagomedov, Peter Taub

Commissioned by V-A-C Foundation
Site under construction. Contact: info@tausmakhacheva.com