Casa Mondo: Food
Shae Myles - 30th June 2022
It’s always interesting how some artists/writers just assume you’ll know what they’re on about. I picked up an intriguing book at the Fruitmarket in Edinburgh a few months ago; it was small and had the word “food” on it; that’s what caught my attention. When I flipped it over to read the back, it told me that “Casa Mondo: Food by Martí Guixé is a fictional essay on what twenty-first century food is and what it represents”, so I bought it. I wanted to know what this guy had to say, having never heard of him before, I wondered whether his perspective would enlighten me to fall back in love with the concept of food art.
Printed on the inside cover of the book, is a small section about the author. It kind of bored me, because it was one of those artist statements that have a lot of words but don’t particularly say much. I craved more info, immediately. The first line, however, piqued my interest: “With more than 25 years on Food Design, Martí Guixé is considered the pioneer of this field.” Not just a pioneer, the pioneer. So naturally, I went onto his insta. He is following 6 accounts, three of which are his own projects and that made me lol. After scrolling through briefly, I wasn’t feeling particularly inspired; a few dodgy filters used here and there, bad lighting… I was done, time to continue reading. The next two pages included descriptions: About Casa Mondo, About Casa Mondo: Food, About Food Design. While reading these descriptions I thought about the first line of this piece... So many words, so little explanation. Just a whole lot of name dropping and empty sentences. I felt like I had to google everything they were telling me just to get some context.
The next section of the book described a really interesting project though. The Casa Mondo Project. An exhibition hosted on insta in June 2020, Casa Mondo was developed to explore the themes of contemporary domestic living, and began before the pandemic hit. With the reality of the pandemic, the artists involved in the project found themselves adapting to the effects and implications of lockdown. Naturally, because all our living situations were turned upside down, and notions of home are what they set out to address. While typical exhibitions about the home and domesticity might be inclined to be organised into the rooms where activities, rituals and processes are carried out, Casa Mondo was divided into “function-zones” to encapsulate the themes they were prompted by. The zones were, Open windows, Food, Learning, Threshold, Care, Home-working, and Exploring. Each of these zones were assigned to an artist, who were invited to respond to their allocated theme in any way they liked. I love when this kind of freedom is welcomed when making work, and I think that these very open prompts are so beneficial in testing your imagination and creativity, and allow you to produce something unexpected or unplanned.
The next page told me that the exhibition was still viewable online, so before I went any further, I opened another tab on my laptop and pulled up the @maxxicasamondo instagram account. I loved it. Like properly loved it. It wasn’t half arsed, it wasn’t ugly… it reeeeeally scratched the itch that had been tickling my skin while reading this book up until this point. I felt inspired again, and eager to read on. They went on to explain that “Within “Casa Mondo,” Martí Guixé has proposed a veritable theory of the relationship between home and food and the new means of consumption, starting with the revolution in our eating habits and customs, with the introversion generated by the 11 September terrorist attacks and ending with the recent quarantine.” I then began to think that this was the purpose of the book, to give this insta exhibition a comfy, physical bed to call home. (I later found that it was not, and I was disappointed... spoiler alert !!) This text wasn’t supposed to be sharing my thoughts on this exhibition, so I’ll just let you go ahead and have a look if you fancy it. It’s lovely.
Continuing on with the little book that I held in my hand and felt a bit perplexed by, what followed was Martí Guixé’s six short texts and accompanying diagrams regarding food:
I: World: Welcome Home
II: Hyperhospitality
III: Food Is The Place
IV: Poly-ethnic Non-mother
V: SIRICHEF de Cuisine
VI: Modern Architecture vs Food Design
The diagrams remind me of the drawings I used to do on a napkin in boring restaurants while I patiently waited for my pizza to come as a kid. Stick figures, wibbly lines, paired with boxy, emphasised hand-drawn titles. I liked them, they had a lot of character, and suggest to me that they flowed out in a stream of consciousness when Guixé was initially laying the foundations of this book.
The first text attempts to encapsulate the themes we were going to be dealing with. It starts by saying: “In the year 2000, if you travelled without luggage you could extend your home to the world and so in effect the world was your home.” I’m not sure if it was just my lack of context and understanding at this point, but in the moment I literally had to read this back so many times. I kept trying to decipher what Guixé meant by describing this book as a fictional essay. Maybe my mind isn’t open enough to comprehend the satire and references he makes throughout the book, but I’m going to try and break each text down for you briefly. So World: Welcome Home basically talks about the parallels that exist in regards to our perceptions of home after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and during the pandemic. I’m not really sure I entirely understand what those parallels are though.
Hyperhospitality lays out a metaphor: “if the world comes into your house you should welcome it according to the principles of hospitality.” That is food, in the form of Instagram posts of things you’ve cooked, shelter, by helping to protect the environment, and safety, by helping the world politically. Idk… this just sounds so silly to me. I like silly art, like so much, but I guess I don’t like silly theory? Or silly fictional theory. I’m also not really sure if I get this one either… it doesn’t paint a clear picture in my head - is “The World” that’s coming to your house just the world uninhabited, like the world we see in textbooks that are too small to be able to suggest any signs of life? Because that’s what the diagrams that are included alongside the text suggest to me.
Food Is The Place is probably the one I disliked the most. Mainly because it started by saying “The virtual world is increasingly important,” ~omg duh~. “We work and socialise online, we play video games, we communicate via smartphones. Food is one of the few real things left.” It honestly just feels like I’m reading a really poor artist statement at this point. Yes, we do all communicate via smartphones, and I’m aware that food is a tangible, real, tasty thing we actively, physically put into our bodies but SO WHAT? How is this new? How is this important for me to read? How is it making me think critically about food’s place in contemporary society? It’s not. It’s making me roll my eyes and it’s making me hungry. This was Guixé quoting himself from 2014, and on the page next to it, was his thoughts on this statement today, with the pandemic in mind. He explains how “food remains our only link to a relationship with or reference to nature.” Boring.
In Poly-ethnic Non-mother, Guixé compares a mother’s “intuitive” ability to cook, with the plethora of cooking videos and tutorials available on YouTube. He describes how typical domestic traditions are passed down through friends and families in the form of rituals, cookbooks and a shared cooking culture, but all of this is being replaced by YouTube. “...the figure of the mother as carrier and transmitter of gastronomic information from generation to generation is replaced by big data and recipe videos.” I don’t like this for two reasons: one, gender stereotypes (please, I thought it was a thing of the past to assume the mother does all the cooking) and two: I feel like suggesting that one day we will all rely on YT for recipes is pretty closed minded, there are so many cultures that this absolutely will not happen to on such a drastic scale. It just feels very “back in my day…” okay grandpa, so what are we gonna do about it if it’s such a problem?
SIRICHEF de Cuisine talks about a fictional AI which is quite interesting. I liked this one. Guixé imagines that SIRICHEF would be unlike Siri, in that they would have empathy and the ability to utilise real materials and foods that impact our senses. They would however, share the same understanding of their user as Siri does; they would know everything about us and know what to do with that information in real and personal terms. I’m imagining it would work like this: instead of you asking Siri “what should I cook for tea tonight?” and he would just google it for you, leaving you no further forward other than scrolling through BBC Good Food for hours, you would ask SIRICHEF “can you cook something for me?” and they would know what you wanted, and make it for you. This isn’t described at all in the text, it’s just what I imagine Guixé meant, and I’m unsure if it’s intentional that he writes without fully fleshing out his ideas and concepts. This was the only text that managed to spark my imagination, and obviously I know there’s no right or wrong answers, bc it’s fiction after all, but I did kinda feel like he’d captured my attention again at this point, like the flame of a flickering candle threatening to die out any minute now.
Finally, the sixth text: Modern Architecture vs Food Design starts off by asking “is it the kitchen that makes the food, or is it the food, the gastronomic culture and the tradition that condition the kitchen as an element for the transformation of food?” I like this, it kinda felt like a tongue twister for my brain. Guixé talks about and details in his accompanying diagram, that in this new word, the house as a symbol is no longer relevant: it doesn’t protect you from the outside world, because the Internet exists, and nothing is private anymore.
The last section of the book was easily my favourite. Probably because I actually understood it, and that’s probably because it was the text that was expanded upon the most. I’m not asking to be spoon fed, I just want more context, more fully formulated concepts. You can’t dangle the glimpse of an idea in front of your reader and expect them to do all the hard work for you. Or maybe you can. Maybe I’m just lazy.
Anyway, it’s titled: Casa Mondo In-House Restaurant, and I’m actually excited to tell you about this part because I like the concept a lot. It begins with a sketch that shows who I assume to be SIRICHEF, hugging a human, surrounded by different elements like a phone and a virtual world inside a box. You flip the page, and each of these external elements are numbered one to five, with accompanying text that explains that these are “five points for a new gastronomy… based on 28 years of research in Food Design. Theory requires a concise formulation. The points are not related at all to aesthetic fantasies or the search for the effects of fashion, but concern culinary events involving a totally new type of gastronomy.” I don’t love this description, but I think I get it. Gastronomy is the practice or art of choosing, cooking, and eating good food, so I guess he’s imagining how we might one day evolve to have a new approach with technological advancements and major societal and cultural shifts (like 9/11 and the pandemic) in mind.
The next page isolates the first of the five points for a new gastronomy: AI-CHEF Gourmet. AI-CHEF Gourmet is responsible for food, not in a virtual sense, but in a material sense. They have the ability to express and feel empathy, and assists their users with their culinary tasks “with all their technical, technological, sensorial and cultural implications.”
2. Instagram Bon Vivant Public Eye. In this one, Guixé talks about how food has the ability to be captured through video and photography in order to express social status. We offer hospitality to the world (as was touched upon in Hyperhospitality) by sharing our culinary sessions online.
3. Mixed-Media Food Chain | No Rules, starts by explaining that in this new gastronomy, there is no need to follow rules or regulations. There’s no such thing as something being inedible, unhealthy or lacking nutrition, but what determines what you eat is based on your skills, learned experiences, personal culture and knowledge. The diagram illustrates items such as a houseplant, a cardboard box, coral, grains and strawberries, suggesting that everything and anything would be acceptable and safe to consume.
4. Sketch Food. Guixé says that in conventional homemade food, despite us following a recipe, repeating the steps laid out, and replicating the same dish, what we end up with is not a model or a prototype. We get a final, finished dish because the original recipe was local or national. So with this in mind, when we follow a recipe that originated online, it is no longer local, so will “always be an outline or a prototype, having the character of an endless mock-up, always unfinished and never authentic.” This one really was puzzling to me lmao, and the sketch didn’t help me to understand much more. But I think what he’s getting at here is a comment on the legitimacy and authenticity of food cultures in the digital age.
5. Site-Specific Meals: my favourite. In this element of the new gastronomy, we are told that the two main objects associated with eating, the table and the plate, are not needed. “Each meal is a personal installation, performative, and consistent with the context and the moment.” I really like this, probably bc I love performance art, and I can really see this coming into fruition as a concept through movement and play in an art context. This idea is also fleshed out with the idea of ritual at the forefront; in that they are laid out, expected of the diners in a performative way. Food does not just nourish and feed us, but sustains us digitally, by having the ability to be captured through a lens and streamed or documented, to be displayed online.
After each of these ideas are laid out, we are told that if this new gastronomy became our reality, there would be nothing left of the cooking and eating habits of the present, and we would not benefit from the literary and historical teachings of cooking schools and studies. I feel like it might have been helpful to know that at the beginning, to really lay out what we were getting into, to allow ourselves to be fully immersed in this new world that Guixé is proposing to us. He ends the book by saying “The age of the Food Designer is coming.” Which I just feel is just kinda brushed over. We get a bit of context into food design at the beginning of the book, but other than that, the term is just thrown around here and there with not much relevance imo.
Overall, the writing was generally unclear, a bit confusing to me, and isn’t pushed far enough to really make any solid points, or at least ones I will remember going forward. We go from talking about an instagram exhibition (that we find out really has nothing to do with the book) to 9/11 and the way that affected our luggage, to imagining an AI chef that cooks for us, who is like Siri but isn't, to the proposal of a new way to experience cooking and eating where we can literally eat anything including house plants and their pots, all while live-streaming while sitting on the floor of a box because nothing is private anymore bc of the internet and oh, food designers are in.
As I said before, perhaps this writing style was intentional, idk, it’s supposed to be fictitious, as I found myself constantly repeating in my head. Only by writing this text and really breaking it down, have I come to grips with the ideas presented, and I’m not even really sure if I fully got it. For me, Casa Mondo: Food was a collection of sporadic thoughts, vague connections and blurry references, but I did like that it pushed me to really sit up and analyse. Maybe Guixé’s intention was to be vague, to test the reader’s imagination, but I just think it could have been prefaced more effectively so we knew what we were in for.