Sobremesa: Vagaries of the Palette

Sobremesa: Vagaries of the Palette is the pilot project which lingers post-meal, post-action, at the afterparty, and post-performance, in spaces where guards lower and the metaphorical seat at the table showcases the failings of the project of integration. Food here refuses neutrality: no mere conviviality or cultural diffusion, but a charged medium, material witness to nation-states and their identity construction. Starting in Southern Europe, with borders that were once permeable by south of the south and east of east, the project acknowledges cuisines as constructions that disregard their mobility shaped by displacement, trade routes, and survival tactics - on the one hand diluting incoming food cultures while on the other hand entirely excluding them from the table. The question isn't perhaps about who gets a seat at the table, but where the table starts and ends.

And so, the question that remains - Can the countries within, let alone Europe (whole), claim cultural homogeneity? Does the project of unification risk the differences inhabiting the regions? And yet, what, if at all, is the criticality of the classification against which this project positions itself?

This transnational pilot - supported by the European Union - situated in and between Greece, Portugal, Italy, and the Basque region of Spain, confronts gastronationalism's grip on Europe and against "Bourdainification" of the media culture around food. Through practice-led methodology, co-curatorial fieldwork, transnational residencies, communal programmes translating research into lived experience, sustainable partnerships - Sobremesa reveals internal borders: migrant routes absent from maps, diasporic ferments erased from heritage.