Poetics of Tasting: a Tale of Resistance
AWARE, Villa Marie Vassilieff, 21 Avenue de Maine, 75015 Paris
May 13, 2025





French version
For its third edition as part of the “Care as Methodology” program, the Initiative for Practices and Visions of Radical Care is pleased to present Poetics of Tasting, developed in collaboration with the INLAND, Basta Theatre, and La Famille Rester.Étranger collectives. This program was conceived at the invitation of AWARE: Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions.
Poetics of Tasting explores culinary memory as both a site of cultural transmission and an active practice of resistance. Recipes are approached not merely as instructions but as alternative repositories of knowledge — forms of embodied epistemology that carry within them histories, gestures, and local memory that transcend written language.
Audiences are invited to engage with these narratives through sensation and performative dialogue with the participating collectives. Sensory experiences such as tasting, touching, and smelling become integral to understanding how culinary knowledge encodes the affective and social conditions under which food is prepared, shared, and remembered. Recipes operate as living archives, transmitting cultural practices across generations and geographies, sustaining communal identities even in contexts marked by dispossession, displacement, or exile. The transmission of taste — through texture, scent, temperature — forges a sense of community, particularly in the context of physical absence. The inability to cook or share a meal, as experienced by communities living in forced isolation, disrupts the continuity of cultural memory and sense of belonging.
Photo credits: Marion Mille, Zala Norčič