Cooking Catastrophes

A performance in which you taste the end of the world.

Miso soup floods a city of tofu and seaweed. A chocolate ice cream glacier starts to melt slowly until a brown avalanche buries tiny marzipan houses beneath it. The raspberry, hazelnut and mint bordered streets made of licorice jelly breaks apart from the force of the shaking and ruptures down the middle. A bread and butter city is set alight and flambéed when a miniature aeroplane crashes into it...

Cooking Catastrophes is a cookery performance in which the hard to digest, even overwhelming realities of disaster scenarios are made shockingly delicious. Tsunamis, volcanic eruptions and earthquakes are made from food in front of the audience to be artfully served over several courses. The guests sit at tables throughout the space at which the individual catastrophes in the series are prepared and initiated. Simultaneously, a camera witnesses the making of these edible, devastated landscapes in close-up. The close-ups, projected huge on a screen, reflect the spectacular effects one recognises from the media coverage of these events. Images that appear to show everything but remain curiously blind. How is this general visibility and our reasoning capacity effected by the disastrous effects of earthquakes, volcanoes, terrorist attacks, nuclear accidents, oil spills, typhoons, forest fires or floods?
This is a heavy diet, which the audience finally also gets to taste when they are given the cutlery in order to literally spoon out the prepared catastrophes. This humorously sweet yet bitter game is completely free of finger-pointing and that is why it is so politically potent, not just to ruminate on but also to digest.