Sobremesa: Vagaries of the Palate is a 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: not mere conviviality or cultural diffusion, but a charged medium, material witness to nation-states and their identity construction. 

Currently in its pilot phase, starting in Southern Europe, across Greece, Italy, Portugal, and the Basque region of Spain, whose borders are increasingly less permeable to the south of the south and east of east, the project acknowledges cuisines as constructions that discount 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 is not simply who gets a seat at the table, but where and when the table begins and ends.

Sobremesa develops research methodologies, artistic practices, and mechanisms for examining how cultural identities are constructed, circulated, and transformed through the lens of food practices. Its pilot phase brings together artists, researchers, cultural practitioners, policy-makers, and communities across Southern and South Eastern Europe to test what becomes possible when research is conducted transnationally rather than through fixed national frameworks, towards developing alternative methodologies for confronting hegemonic cultural identity.

Through site-specific residencies, comparative research, dialogue, exchange, public programmes, and policy-level shifts, the project creates situations in which divergent understandings of food, heritage, and belonging can encounter one another. The post-meal moment becomes a methodological condition: not a space of consensus but one in which contradiction, memory, disagreement, and exchange can be productive.

Working across local, national, and transnational scales, Sobremesa traces how culinary practices shift, change, and acquire meaning – producing research, frameworks, and tools that can inform geopolitical turns and contribute to contemporary concerns within and beyond the context of the EU.

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