Author's Proof

El festín is the materialization of trial and error in the artist’s career. It is the result of an author’s test translated into three different versions and, consequently, rich and interesting in their particularities. Velvet began her first feast in 2011 and has managed to experience three different dynamics of the same concept and symbolic-sensory experience. 

The first feast consisted of self-service for the participating public. The artist conceived and prepared a banquet-like buffet that in its essence, was an edible installation, which was modified as the public interacted with it. In this first rehearsal, the artist did not interact with either the work or the audience. She played the role of threading the whole possible operational process and observed what the public was leaving after their contact with the piece. The aesthetic and conceptual twist of the work lies in the utensils offered to the participant for the self-service of the food. Velvet perforated the cutlery and disabled them from their primary function. It proposed, then, a feast in which the audience interacted with the very disability to serving themselves and led them to experience forms of communication with each other in a radical way.

The crude empathy was in the test of generating human relationships beyond social roles; in putting on the table of the feast the distancing, the lack of communication, and the manifest differentiation of social strata that dominates the contemporary world and subverting them before the need for communication and nourishment as basic poles of the evolution of society. A feast that breaks with the margins and social codes, notably visible in the Aruban context -as in other Caribbean regions- in terms of tourist culture and service, where we are forced to offer a smile and empathy, many times crude and false, to be in tune with the benefits offered to tourists once they pay to enjoy the role of “being served”, and no longer of “self-service”.  

The second feast consisted of an experience in which Velvet became more directly involved with the public and the work. She was an active part of the culinary installation diners and turned to the generation of a bilateral empathy with the others who ate around her. In this rehearsal, she experienced from within her individuality, the very disability of self-service and the need for communication with the other. She deployed empathic social forms to confront the public in the face of an elemental lack, such as the difficulty of collective nourishment.

The third feast involved a more in-depth conception of this work in progress based on trial and error, experimentation, and participation. Velvet not only interacted with the audience and the work but in this rehearsal, she played the role of the subject serving the food. She proposed a seven-phase menu composed, among other elements, of a bitter herbal tea from the courtyard to start, stone soup with seaweed as a second course, and so on, until in collaboration with other artists; a unique culinary menu to which the participants had free access. 

She conceived a culinary discourse through performative and experiential actions that sought to generate that raw empathy through the effect of food. She put to “dialogue” at the same table roles that, in their natural state, do not establish any synergy. Velvet proposed an approach to the empathic state of the subjects through food as a binding and elemental resource of the human being.