Materials: Sakotis, Tiramisù
Dimensions: variable
Istallation view: Nida Art Colony, Vilnius Academy of Arts
Photo credit: Sophie Bellot
This project has as subject the production of a new sweet created joining two already existing recipes: in the encounter both the recipes lose their origins and meaning and merge complementarly to represent and give shape to a story inspired by episodes that came from the novel by Thomas Mann “The young Joseph” (1934). The recipes chosen for this project are Sakotis and Tiramisu.
The Sakotis is a lithuanian sweet with a monumental shape that, for this quality, aspires always in being an expression of continuous permanence in the course of the time. This intention of length creates an interesting paradox, because it is in antithesis with the decayble nature of the stuff itself and with the declared function of object of consumption. Sakotis also represents a tree without roots: this is an interesting quality because seems to be an answer to the similitude that the young Joseph presents to his father Jacob dealing with the origins of histories, hidden to the sight as the roots of a tree. The research of the origins, answered the father, that takes nowhere: no one is able to say where histories have origin, «They are the eternal present, the union of duplicity, the statue that got the name: “At the same time”» .
The Tiramisù instead is a non traditional italian dessert, presumably invented in Friuli region in 1950’s. It’s composed reinventing and joining different recipes, non properly italian, but that could be able to write a different story before not existing.
Their complemental union wants to describe a fundamental episode that belongs to the Mann’s novel where Joseph, after having been beaten by his brothers, is flown into a grave-cistern completely naked. After three days of agony, a group of desert’s traders, looking for water, rescue him from death, and he re-deliveries himself to life with the name of Usarsif. Tha Sakotis doesn’t represent indeed only a tree but also a cavity, while the Tiramisu hidden inside is looking, as Joseph does, a contact with the outside world. An help request that takes place in silence through the translation of its own name: pick me up.
WITH THE SUPPORT OF THE PROJECT DE.MO./MOVIN’UP 2012
