Ötzi, a new work by Alfonso Borragán, will be a banquet of transient signs. A ritualistic dinner, a one night event exploring diverse interpretations of ingestion and cultural absorption.
Food, used here as a mediating technology, will be set up as a scenario for the interaction of bodies and experiences.

Less a relational practice, the work Ötzi—named after the first european human found with inked body marks—will deal with layers of history and digestion of signs that are literally recorded in flesh. The the dining table is not just seen as a ‘gathering place’. Proteins, particles and transformed biological structures becomethe media through which deeper histories are disclosed.

Ink pre-dates paper as the primary material for remembrance and amnesia, possibly even the writing of history.
This text is an invitation to participate in a singular congregation, a gathering for the consumption of ephemeral signs.

Alfonso Borragán’s work strives to understand food as a technique and as a cultural technology. His practice explores different techniques of affect and sociality. These are often set ups that tackle how social systems interact through exposures, exchanges and contiguities. His work experiments with different apparatuses of memory—archival devices of documentation that often take unusual forms. In Ötzi, living material will perform the task of remembering.

NOTE: Ötzi has been postponed. The next date will be notified via mailing list.

Would you like to see your lover thrown away in a bin just because his eyebrows areslightly bigger than “average”?

Tinata Presents: Reclaim!

This month Tinata wanted to tell you the story about how much delicious food goes wasted in UK and around the world every day. And to do so we teamed up with a bunch of good people who know a lot about it!

We worked with Feeding the 5k, Best Before Project, The People’s Kitchen, Bootstrap, Merci Marie and many shops and businesses to prepare a yummy four-course freegan dining experience for you. All ingredients were saved from oblivion and combined by a chef, artists, friends, Tinata’s team and a lot of you who came to help! The meal set the basis of a discussion about the reclamation and consumption of discarded food. Speakers, including Niki Charalampopoulou from feed the 5k, uncovered food myths and let us in on surprising food waste facts.

Café Prèsque Presents: A Meal of Style

“We present, for your dining pleasure, a meal of style.

Having devised a collection of the most garish and aesthetically perplexing dishes imaginable, we seek to dazzle you with some of the most bizarre and mysterious forms of food presentation known to mankind. Taking inspiration from the once fashionable arts of ambiguous garnishing, incessant piping, and ostentatious food-dressing, we have designed a meal that goes all out. ‘It’s too much!’ we hear you cry. And indeed, perhaps we needn’t have moulded that fois gras into a figure of Michelangelo’s David, or turned that melon into a bunch of grapes. But let us forget necessity for a moment. Let us for once take delight in the flamboyance of yesteryears, in the extravagance of kings!

Please do not fear, oh gracious diner. Beneath the kitsch and semi-unpalatable exterior lies a discrete and unprecedented handling of flavour that only a master chef de cuisine could concoct, with unforeseen flavours belying even the most familiar of dishes.”

Diners should come with an open mind and a good appetite.

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The meal can be vegetarian