View and download 'Scoring Conviviality' by Adriana Gallo here

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Text commissioned by Aliaskar Abarkas during his residency with Cubitt Artists.

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A meal is a score. Or more precisely, a meal is scored. A meal might well be understood as a coordinated, though not completely pre-determined, accumulation or sequence of sounds and gestures which operate on a sonic register. A base humming frequency of fermentation, for instance, layered with punctuating human chewing and scraping of cutlery. Fermentation here not as a metaphoric frequency, at least not solely, but an actual fizzing and frothing of yeasts and bacterial reproduction. Conviviality expressed sonically with CO2 produced by microbes bumping up against the hard walls of glass or metal vessels. A sound expressed (only) in and through relation and encounter which amplifies its effect. In short: a sort of resonance.

Resonance = relation (a convivial one at that) and accounts for the moment in which distinction between the eater and the eaten, the musician and the audience, and the whistler and the passerby become muddled as the resonant effect is amplified.

The human ear can hear, in frequency, typically 16hz to 20,000hz and amplitude 0.05dB to 130dB. A household refrigerator is 55dBA while a whisper is 25dBA. Yeasts and bacteria respond to sound, the vibrations corresponding to speed of proliferation and growth. But listening itself, inclusive of a more objective hearing ability, is a practice of sensitivity and sensibility: an organ-ic process (in the visceral sense). Questions of taste find their way in as they do with the appreciation –aesthetic or otherwise– of anything sense-able. Where there is taste there is a palate: objective and/or relative. And so, what kind of sensibility constitutes a palate for the aural and the sonic? Or, rather (how) might sound taste and vice versa?

In the meal as a score, these resonances, relations, and encounters are encouraged in a certain sequence or combination (i.e. when you eat what and how much and in what combination). The score leads the eater(s) through a series of encounters with their own emphasis and resonances that themselves are products of encounters within the kitchen, the market, and the field. Imbued in every ingredient is a sonic trail or accumulation. Implied potential and completed sounds. Thin Sardinian flatbreads, Carta di musica, are ‘sheet music’ in translation.

Before their final, fragile, snap comes the slapping of dough and escaping steam. This sonic assemblage is preceded by that of the flour itself which comprises the flatbread. A sonic inheritance all its own. It reverberates with the shaking of wheat seed heads, of mechanical pickers, of workers eating lunch, of mill stones, of shipping containers, of cash registers, of sifting, of baking, of swallowing and whatever comes next. Resonances within encounters at every scale: served up.

Scoring Conviviality Menu
November 29, 2024 | Cubitt Gallery with Aliaskar Abarkas
salt baked vegetables, carta di musica, preserved green citrus salsa verde, lacto fermented beets and coriander seed, lacto fermented fig paste, strained yogurt with fermented plum/persimmon, lacto fermented cherry tomatoes, lacto fermented black muscat grapes and olive oil, flaky salt, parsley, walnuts in their shells, clementines, fig leaf black tea kombucha

Adriana Gallo (b. 1993 Milan, Italy) is an artist, theorist, and culinary practitioner based in New York and
London. Her practice deals with ecologies of labor, metabolic sublimes, dialectics of conviviality, and speculative production through installation, sculpture, text, workshops, lectures, and meals. Gallo holds a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MA in Art & Ecology from Goldsmiths, University of London.