Performance per cucchiai troppo lunghi (2025)
Live performance, handmade long-handled spoons, table and seven foods
By Carola Demarchi and Eugenia Ingegno_ Spoons made by Eugenia Ingegno
Two performers sit facing each other across a table. Long-handled spoons are tied to their wrists, making it impossible for either of them to feed herself. Between them are seven foods of different colours, flavours and consistencies. To feed someone is to act directly upon their need. It brings bodies closer, but also creates dependency: the person offering controls what is given, its quantity and rhythm, while the person receiving can accept, refuse or withdraw. The spoons act as relational prostheses. They extend each body towards the other while maintaining distance, making nourishment possible only through mutual dependence. Food spills, adheres, resists and stains; an offering may be welcomed, rejected or repeatedly imposed. Nourishment becomes an unstable ritual in which roles continually shift. Offering can turn into insistence, care into control, desire into resistance. Reciprocity does not guarantee harmony: each gesture renegotiates the boundary between giving and receiving, attending to another’s need and deciding on their behalf. The performance holds the relationship in a precarious state, between dependence and refusal, the desire to reach the other and the need to remain separate.
