DOI 10.60531/INSIGHTOUT.2023.1.5| TAVAKOLI: BUTTA LA PASTICHE!_ INSIGHTOUT 1(2023) 33past is forgotten. Considering the past as well as thefuture in discussions of the sociotechnical imaginaryfurthermore results in a vision of nation that is deeplyCamp, lending what would otherwise be understoodas“low-class” or“poor taste” a degree of respect often reserved for high culture.Performing Pasts and FuturesCecchini’s performance,Carne e Spirito—literally“flesh and spirit” but perhaps more accurately“bodyand soul”—unfolds as follows:2We begin with a stage decorated to invoke the rolling hills of the Tuscan countryside: yellowed grasscovers the floor while a fallen tree trunk lies at thefront of the stage. Craggy grey boulders punctuate the scene. Two figures challenge this rural idyll.First, to the right of the stage, is Cecchini, sharpening a breaking knife and dressed in a butcher’sapron. Rather than the standard starched white,Cecchini’s uniform is coloured with a vertical greenstripe running from right shoulder to armpit and ared stripe from left shoulder to armpit. The traditional white separates the two. In the mirrored visionof the audience, Cecchini appears as a walking Italiantricolore.The second figure is a recently slaughtered pig, hungby its hind legs from unseen rafters and left hovering a few feet above a bundle of straw and sawdust,into which its blood continues to gather. The effectis the suggestion of a carcass offered from the heavens above. The last decade has seen a continueddownward trend in rainfall across both Northern andSouthern Tuscany.3In Cecchini’s Tuscany it might notrain cats and dogs, but it does seem to rain swine. Ina dislocated performance of his daily labour, Cecchini slices open the belly of his supporting actor, scooping out purple, grey, and pink entrails. What followsis, presumably, less day-to-day. As he separates theoffal by organ, Cecchini recites verses from DanteAlighieri’sInferno.“[…] io venni men, così com’io morisse. E caddi come corpo morto cade,” he cries.“Ifainted as if I had met my death. And then I fell as adead body falls.”4The performance was the opening act of the thirdannualMAD Symposium,a three-day event dedicated to discussion on the production, protection, andculture of food and dining, founded by René Redzepi,chef and co-owner of the restaurant Noma in Copenhagen, David Chang, founder of the Momofukurestaurant chain and food brand, and the formereditorial team of the now discontinued food magazineLucky Peach. In 2013, the symposium theme was“Guts”, dedicated to“visceral stories of strength,persistence, risk-taking, and embracing failure”5.Cecchini, who owns and operates a small butcheryshop in Chianti, was performing on behalf of SlowFood International.Somewhat at odds with its own international status,Slow Food defines its mission as the preservationof local methods, practices, and values related tofood and cookery. The organisation first emergedin the late 1980s as a loose coalition of individuals,figure-headed by Carlo Petrini, whose first courseof public action was to protest both(and sometimes interchangeably) what they considered to bethe fast-foodification of Italian cities and the Americanisation of Italian life.6Today, Slow Food hasestablished a much more significant presence, not2https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hcn1TOYxLuE(accessed 18 July 2023).3Cf. Michael Märker et al.,“Assessment of Land Degradation Susceptibility by Scenario Analysis: A Case Study in Southern Tuscany,Italy”, Geomorphology, 93/1–2(Jan. 2008), 120–129.4Dante Alighieri,La Divina Commedia: Inferno, V, 141–142. English:The Divine Comedy,trans. Allen Mandelbaum(New York, 1991), 81.5https://madfeed.co/mad-symposium/mad-symposium-3-guts/(accessed 18 July 2023).6Cf. Florence Fabricant,“A Faintly Amused Answer to Fast Food”,New York Times, 15 Nov. 1989, C10; Roberta Sassatelli andFederica Davolio,“Consumption, Pleasure and Politics: Slow Food and the Politico-Aesthetic Problematization of Food”,Journal ofConsumer Culture, 10/2(2010), 202–232, at 206.
