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Performative meal
@casa di Belmondo

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Performative meal

@casa di Belmondo

Belmonte Calabro,

2020

U miegghjiu cumpani è u pitittu. Appetite is the best side dish.

Who designed the lunch? Who did it? The guests, who have become actors and actresses, creating space rather than just inhabiting it - staging it. Their gestures - movements, glances and grunts - which activated abstract, otherwise dormant forms. However, this system of multiple relationships was suggested precisely by those dormant geometries - meant as neutral platforms to awaken intuition. The ingredients - artificial or organic, edible or nearly toxic - everyone juggled between. And then those who procured them for us, with patience, kindness, timeliness and mastery.

All we had to do was to blend everything as you would do in a complex recipe: one of those dishes with many flavors, which must all be distinguished. The intent was to portray different but compatible pieces of everyday life together, and to mix many stories around a large table set - at the scale of the landscape.

There was a great confusion, it seemed a cauldron of bodies, which, moving and eating together, built the space of their own stage. The pungent smell of salmoriglio was more present than the din of the diners. They all cackled, but with their hands, not with their voices: they were absorbed in a sort of industrious silence, busy grabbing and biting the wild cuttlefish, which, roasted on the grill. It was in that precise moment that a week of discussions about what were the role, the identity and the destiny of the Seppie di Belmondo came to a conclusion. The moist scent of pine bark - apparently crunchy, it made you want to eat that too - was a counterpoint to the coldness of the oxidized metal. Those hard and inflexible circles on top of the ground had been forged by a good giant like Gennaro, a blacksmith from Cosenza with such affable, soft manners. They were tables, pans and bowls, inviting but fortunately really rigid, the only cornerstones of that suddenly initiated dance. Everyone was swiftly going back and forth, finally aware of how to recognize the safe parts of the garden, where they could walk, sit and let themselves go. The Seppie and the roasted cuttlefish were scattered everywhere, but they also orbited around one of the round platforms to which that gastronomic procession was anchored. A little further on, there were heaps of colorful fried vegetables, cultivated with enthusiastic effort by Mariella among the ups and downs of Spineto and cooked following precisely all her suggestions. As a last, more orderly outpost, there was what could not be missing: a row of Belmonte tomatoes, cut into thick slices, arranged like colors on a palette and seasoned theatrically from above, as in a propitiatory dance. At first no one came close to them, since those tomatoes seemed so composed, almost inviolable - you could no more than dare to smell them. But then, as soon as someone started to creatively imagine ways to handle those deliberately inflated proportions, the whole symphony of cheerful disorder naturally started right there, from the tomatoes.

We wanted to construct a simple ritual, in which particular habits could emerge and adapt to each other, stimulated by the right architectural props. Actually we hoped, and it happened, that those who were there would eat and perform spontaneously. We didn’t aim to transfigure routines into exceptions, rather we aimed to finally reveal them as exceptional acts.

Directed and curated by Lemonot

with

La Rivoluzione delle Seppie

Photos

Silvia Gin

Nicola Barbuto

Luca Pitasi

Margherita Manfra

Performative meal

@casa di Belmondo

Belmonte Calabro

2020

U miegghjiu cumpani è u pitittu. Appetite is the best side dish.


Who designed the lunch? Who did it? The guests, who have become actors and actresses, creating space rather than just inhabiting it - staging it. Their gestures - movements, glances and grunts - which activated abstract, otherwise dormant forms. However, this system of multiple relationships was suggested precisely by those dormant geometries - meant as neutral platforms to awaken intuition. The ingredients - artificial or organic, edible or nearly toxic - everyone juggled between. And then those who procured them for us, with patience, kindness, timeliness and mastery.


All we had to do was to blend everything as you would do in a complex recipe: one of those dishes with many flavors, which must all be distinguished. The intent was to portray different but compatible pieces of everyday life together, and to mix many stories around a large table set - at the scale of the landscape.


There was a great confusion, it seemed a cauldron of bodies, which, moving and eating together, built the space of their own stage. The pungent smell of salmoriglio was more present than the din of the diners. They all cackled, but with their hands, not with their voices: they were absorbed in a sort of industrious silence, busy grabbing and biting the wild cuttlefish, which, roasted on the grill. It was in that precise moment that a week of discussions about what were the role, the identity and the destiny of the Seppie di Belmondo came to a conclusion. The moist scent of pine bark - apparently crunchy, it made you want to eat that too - was a counterpoint to the coldness of the oxidized metal. Those hard and inflexible circles on top of the ground had been forged by a good giant like Gennaro, a blacksmith from Cosenza with such affable, soft manners. They were tables, pans and bowls, inviting but fortunately really rigid, the only cornerstones of that suddenly initiated dance. Everyone was swiftly going back and forth, finally aware of how to recognize the safe parts of the garden, where they could walk, sit and let themselves go. The Seppie and the roasted cuttlefish were scattered everywhere, but they also orbited around one of the round platforms to which that gastronomic procession was anchored. A little further on, there were heaps of colorful fried vegetables, cultivated with enthusiastic effort by Mariella among the ups and downs of Spineto and cooked following precisely all her suggestions. As a last, more orderly outpost, there was what could not be missing: a row of Belmonte tomatoes, cut into thick slices, arranged like colors on a palette and seasoned theatrically from above, as in a propitiatory dance. At first no one came close to them, since those tomatoes seemed so composed, almost inviolable - you could no more than dare to smell them. But then, as soon as someone started to creatively imagine ways to handle those deliberately inflated proportions, the whole symphony of cheerful disorder naturally started right there, from the tomatoes.


We wanted to construct a simple ritual, in which particular habits could emerge and adapt to each other, stimulated by the right architectural props. Actually we hoped, and it happened, that those who were there would eat and perform spontaneously. We didn’t aim to transfigure routines into exceptions, rather we aimed to finally reveal them as exceptional acts.


Directed and curated by Lemonot

with

La Rivoluzione delle Seppie

Photos

Silvia Gin

Nicola Barbuto

Luca Pitasi

Margherita Manfra

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lemonot

Sabrina Morreale, AA Dipl
Lorenzo Perri, AA Dipl (Hons)

London / Prato

projects@lemonot.co.uk

ABOUT

This is Tooltip!

Sabrina Morreale and Lorenzo Perri are architects, educators and founding partners of Lemonot – a duo for spatial and relational practices, architecture and performative arts. We graduated together at the Architectural Association and we’re now based between London and Italy.

Our projects re-invent the relationship between urban fabric and human rituals through a wide range of media: pavilions, exhibitions, short films and designed performances. We relentlessly seek new forms of togetherness, with a contextual yet transterritorial approach that aims to detect, celebrate and trigger the spontaneous theatre of everyday life. 

We experiment with the language of artistic strategies in public space, empowering alternative narratives and unexpected interactions – to initiate unconventional acts of place-making. We explore how architects can contribute to a peculiar reinterpretation of the city, defining novel 1:1 experiences through short and long-term occupational strategies. Dealing with multiple stakeholders at the same time, we often intervene as both facilitators and designers – constructing supporting spatial structures to make things happen.

Our constant engagement in academia is a crucial part of Lemonot. In 2018-19, we taught as Adjunct Professors at INDA in Bangkok and we’ve been Programme Heads of the AA Visiting School El Alto (Bolivia). Lorenzo taught at the University of Applied Arts Vienna  (dieAngewandte) in Architectural Studio 1 from 2020 to 2023, while Sabrina is currently Studio Master in the Foundation Course at the AA in London. Together, we now lead the Architectural Design Studio 7: Convivial-ism at the Royal College of Art in London. 

We collaborate with several cultural institution – including Arquine, La Biennale di Venezia, DPR Barcelona, LINA European Architecture Platform, S AM Basel, Architecture at the Edge (West Ireland) – and our projects have been exhibited and awarded internationally: among the others, at the Young Talent Architecture Award 2016, at the ATT19 Gallery in Bangkok, at the RIBA, at Vienna Design Week, at Bangkok Design Week, at Milan Design Week, at Archifest Singapore 2019, at Mextropoli 2021 in Mexico City, at FAR-Architecture Festival of Rome 2022 and at CAFx Copenhagen Architecture Film Festival 2023.

Furthermore, Lemonot is one of the 9 selected architectural practices for the Padiglione Italia – curated by Fosbury Architecture – of the Venice Architecture Biennale 2023, and Sabrina has been appointed as the 2024 Enel Foundation Italian Fellow in Architecture at the American Academy in Rome.

Lina Fellows 2022/2023

“Spaziale” – Padiglione Italia, Venice Architecture Biennale, 2023

close-40
This is Tooltip!
lemonot

Sabrina Morreale, AA Dipl
Lorenzo Perri, AA Dipl (Hons)

London, Vienna, Stockholm, La Paz and Italy

projects@lemonot.co.uk

ABOUT

This is Tooltip!

Sabrina Morreale and Lorenzo Perri are architects, educators and founding partners of Lemonot – a duo for spatial and relational practices, architecture and performative arts. We graduated together at the Architectural Association and we’re now based between London and Italy.

Our projects re-invent the relationship between urban fabric and human rituals through a wide range of media: pavilions, exhibitions, short films and designed performances. We relentlessly seek new forms of togetherness, with a contextual yet transterritorial approach that aims to detect, celebrate and trigger the spontaneous theatre of everyday life. 

We experiment with the language of artistic strategies in public space, empowering alternative narratives and unexpected interactions – to initiate unconventional acts of place-making. We explore how architects can contribute to a peculiar reinterpretation of the city, defining novel 1:1 experiences through short and long-term occupational strategies. Dealing with multiple stakeholders at the same time, we often intervene as both facilitators and designers – constructing supporting spatial structures to make things happen.

Our constant engagement in academia is a crucial part of Lemonot. In 2018-19, we taught as Adjunct Professors at INDA in Bangkok and we’ve been Programme Heads of the AA Visiting School El Alto (Bolivia). Lorenzo taught at the University of Applied Arts Vienna  (dieAngewandte) in Architectural Studio 1 from 2020 to 2023, while Sabrina is currently Studio Master in the Foundation Course at the AA in London. Together, we now lead the Architectural Design Studio 7: Convivial-ism at the Royal College of Art in London. 

We collaborate with several cultural institution – including Arquine, La Biennale di Venezia, DPR Barcelona, LINA European Architecture Platform, S AM Basel, Architecture at the Edge (West Ireland) – and our projects have been exhibited and awarded internationally: among the others, at the Young Talent Architecture Award 2016, at the ATT19 Gallery in Bangkok, at the RIBA, at Vienna Design Week, at Bangkok Design Week, at Milan Design Week, at Archifest Singapore 2019, at Mextropoli 2021 in Mexico City, at FAR-Architecture Festival of Rome 2022 and at CAFx Copenhagen Architecture Film Festival 2023.

Furthermore, Lemonot is one of the 9 selected architectural practices for the Padiglione Italia – curated by Fosbury Architecture – of the Venice Architecture Biennale 2023, and Sabrina has been appointed as the 2024 Enel Foundation Italian Fellow in Architecture at the American Academy in Rome.

Lina Fellows 2022/2023

“Spaziale” – Padiglione Italia, Venice Architecture Biennale, 2023