08 SPOTLIGHT: TEREZA STEHLIKOVA
Short film based on Journey to the Interior performance, 2017. Video credit: Tereza Stehlikova
CULINARY ARTS + MULTISENSORY EXPERIENCE
Czech born Tereza Stehlikova is an artist, filmmaker, and senior lecturer at The Royal College of Art and The University of Westminster. Her main field of interest lies in our senses and a crossmodal approach to the experience of art. With a myriad of diverse muses, from femininity, to nature, geology, literature, and the human experience, Stehlikova is an artist who uses her practice to travel deep into our unconscious on every level possible.
Her multisensory work often uses the culinary arts in multiple forms as a tool or artistic medium. She describes eating as an internal journey where our inner and exterior worlds come to meet. We sat down with her to discuss her use of food and our encounters with eating in many of her performance pieces and films.
How do the culinary arts play into your interest in multisensory experience?
Eating is the perfect analogy for perception. We are literally incorporating the world into our bodies, through all our senses. The food we see, smell, touch, hear and taste as we chew it, swallow it, becomes part of us. It is just like taking in experience. It is an experience!
In my projects involving the culinary arts, I began by imagining eating as a form of journeying. I looked for inspiration in travel, adventures that are real or imagined, and investigated how such journeys can be “translated” into a culinary experience. Additionally, I have always been struck how food, when transformed by culinary arts, becomes a kind of landscape: it concentrates all the textures, colours, shapes, all the multi-sensory impressions one desires to trigger the imagination. It is the perfect entry point for an adventure to begin.
Tell us about your 2017 work Journey to the Interior – how did you use food to combine the arts and sciences?
The project was born of a series of sensory workshops, which I ran every two weeks at the Dissenters Chapel in London’s Kensal Green Cemetery in 2016/2017. The workshops helped me bring together a number of people from different disciplines (arts, science, design), connected by their interest in sensory perception and the role of the body in creating a meaningful experience.
As the workshops progressed, they became directly focused on a narrative which I took from Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864). I was drawn to this story which combines knowledge of geology with the most wonderful journey of imagination. It was no coincidence either: Kensal Green Cemetery is the resting place of George Bellas Greenough, a pioneering British geologist, who became the key inspiration in this quest. The idea was to create a multi-sensory participative performance for a small number of guests and take them on an adventure to the centre of the earth.
During the performance our guests, already primed by the invitation to this event, were blindfolded and gently immersed in a multi-sensory narrative, taking them deep down to the Earth’s core. Once initiated this way, their senses sensitised, they were ‘released’ to explore the catacombs alone, with torches, hard hats, and magnifying glasses. What they encountered, scattered amongst the subterranean vegetation, were not only fossils and strange creatures, but also rocks glazed in caramel, on which various flavours and textures could be found. Our guests had to lick these in order to taste the unknown flavours. As I found during my research this is what geologists often do anyway, they use all their senses to understand the composition of rocks.
Journey to the Interior, 2017. Close up of ‘sugar magma’. Image credit: Tereza Stehlikova
The menu design for this project was made in collaboration with the chef Ben Spalding. We worked with textures and flavours that a volcanic landscape contains: Smoked flavours, lichen and moss, fungi, charcoal. One of the courses was served on plates made specially by Jack Alexandroff from clay he himself dug from the local soil. They resembled strange slabs of rock. The dessert consisted of sugar formations, black magma, sugar infused with charcoal, created by artist Ellie Doney (Institute of Making). We wanted to make sure that there was a seamless connection between the design, the meaning and the taste.
Feasting is something which comes up in your work time and time again. Artistically speaking, what is the importance of feasting in your practice?
Feasting has a number of interesting resonances for me. Beyond the points I mentioned earlier, about it being the perfect analogy of perception and taking in of experience, it is also a ritualistic act. For me the different courses which a feast consists of are like stages of progression from one state to the next. Like a hypnosis even, going deeper into the unconscious.
Apart from these multi-sensory immersive performances using food, I have also made a number of short films, dealing with similar themes: a meal becomes a means of transportation to different spaces or states of the mind. So for example a film where a meal takes us on a dive to the bottom of the ocean Dinner for Deep Surface Divers, (2016), encountering various sea creatures which the diners/divers ingest. Or another film called Ophelia’s Last Supper (2018) where the protagonist, Ophelia, ends up drowning herself in a bowl of soup. Here the food she is served (fruits and vegetables) become both sustenance but also a ceremonial decoration, at the same time leaving traces and marks on her body, so that by the time she drowns, the boundaries of her body have been loosened.
My latest film where food is the subject matter is Self-isolation Dinner (2020): a film I made during the first lockdown, which captures a Zoom meal between a real and virtual character. Once again, food is transformed into a kind of landscape for the imagination to roam, taking us from the limits of here and now into an interior world of the senses. Yet again, food becomes a kind of threshold allowing us to cross from one reality to the next.
What is your process when you begin to create cross-modal projects such as these?
I very much trust in the creative process: so that I set out in a certain direction but with an openness to allow the process to shape the final outcome. This is especially interesting in regards to a collaborative process with a number of people from different disciplines involved. I find that new insights can emerge when a suitable space for play is created and an openness is kept, with certain rules given. The sensory workshops model, which I mentioned earlier, works really well for me, as it helps to get everyone involved and excited about the shared exploration, and test various ideas hands on. It also allows for interesting juxtapositions, such as between geology and terroir in winemaking, to name just one.
As an example, the first such collaborative multi-sensory project I initiated and designed, was inspired by an encounter with a chef Charles Michel, whom I met in Professor Charles Spence’s Crossmodal research lab in Oxford, in 2013. Soon after we met I initiated a collaboration, focused on ‘translating’ William Morris’s journey across Iceland into a culinary experience. We literally took short and highly evocative passages from Morris’s diary entries, and translated them into dishes and menus. Very soon, our project gathered a number of different collaborators: set designers, sound artists, performers, chefs, poets, experimental psychologists, food historians etc. The idea was to utilise the scientific insights (or how our senses constantly speak to each other and affect each other, so that a sound affects our flavour perception etc) to enrich our expressive vocabulary and really push ideas as far as we could.
This approach worked really well. The final outcome was an experience (Taste of Iceland: Art, Science and Exploration, 2014) where each room inside a Victorian house took on the properties of the dish, allowing participants to move though this experience fully immersed. It was an unforgettable experience for everyone involved, contributors and participants alike.
What are you currently working on? Where can we expect to see it, or rather, experience it?
The pandemic put a pause on this particular approach to making and experiencing art. Suddenly, the proximity senses have become a threat. Touching and being touched is now a forbidden activity anywhere outside your home. This has made me reflect much on the importance of these projects for the future. I am hoping that once things reopen again, there will be a surge of interest in works that engage all the senses, not just audio-visual ones.
But in the meantime, while waiting, I became interested in creating a space for a dialogue, in a form of an open-source journal called Tangible Territory. It is here that I invite artists, designers and scientists to reflect on the current situation and the role of the senses in making sense. It has become a collaborative and explorative space for me, in the same way the workshops have been.
In the longer term I am also planning a kind of residency in South Bohemia, called Sensing Place, open to anyone interested. The idea here is to use some of the methods of collaboration and experimentation that I have learned from my experience over the years and apply them to a different kind of setting: a rural retreat where nature is at close hand. Once again food and culinary arts, together with science, will play an important role. The plan is to invite a number of guest workshop leaders, such as herbalists, botanists, geologists, designers and culinary specialists to open our senses to the connection between a landscape and the food it produces, and explore how this kind of dialogue can be used creatively to produce new insights and work.
Tereza’s full portfolio of work can be found on her blog here.
The Sensing Place retreat takes in the summer of 2022. If you are interested in attending, please find more information on the Tangible Territory website.
All images and videos shown courtesy of © 2021 Tereza Stehlikova