with Pêdra Costa (performance artist, urban anthropologist) 

in English


The workshop invites to explore how to come together spontaneously, creatively and intuitively for preparing a feast without previously knowing the recipe or the kitchen space. It reflects on the process of cooking as an experience of sensual transformation and the possibilities to surpass oneself. Sensual connotations of eating are linked to collective unconscious representations mediated in advertising, mythologies and more recently, social media. As a participative journey in the pleasures of eating the workshop participants are encouraged to interrogate shared collective imaginaries and the impact they have in everyday modes of interaction when consuming food. Thereby, the cultural representations embedded in cooking and eating will be questioned. The workshop aims to create a space for a collective performative experience of intimacy and political claim through the body. By introducing post-porn as a strategy of pleasure, aesthetics and politics, the workshop encourages to experience cooking as a joyful performance, a place to act together and disturb the gazes, through feelings, desire and empathy. Even more, the social categories of public and private, privileges and subalternity, sameness and alterity embedded in the cultures of eating will be reflected in the action of cooking together. In order to transform social stereotypes at work in the discourses on food and eating, the participants are invited not to eat with the eyes but to listen to their intuition and feel the bonds by sharing food. (The workshop does not require any specific knowledge about cooking. Everyone is welcome to embark in the game.)

Pêdra Costa (1978) is a Brazilian Performance Artist and Anthropologist based in Berlin and working with queer artists internationally. Hers work is informed by the aesthetics of post-porn and an investigation about anti-colonial concepts. Pêdra Costa works with hers body, presenting Performance Art, making videos and writing, using complex and fragmented epistemologies from queer communities, being contaminated by knowledge almost completely destroyed by the colonial project and remembering radical caring against the lack of opportunities of living. S/he engages the political aesthetics of post-porn and anti-colonial strategies. S/he faces failure every day, transforming failure into creative force, in connection with mixed and forgotten ancestralities. Some exhibitions include Multitud Marica: Activaciones de archivos sexo-disidentes en América Latina, Santiago de Chile 2017 (Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende); QUEER ENCOUNTERS_VIENNA TRANS LA, Los Angeles 2017 (CalArts School of Art); WELT KOMPAKT?, Vienna 2017 (frei_raum Q21, MuseumsQuartier); Millionaires Can Be Trans* // You Are So Brave*, Berlin 2015 (Schwules Museum); Oral Museum of the Revolution, Barcelona 2013 (MACBA); Caos e Efeito, São Paulo 2011 (Itaú Cultural).
Website: https://cargocollective.com/pedra.