Wish You Were Here

2010

Mis en place is a cooking term meaning to prepare and arrange all the ingrediants of a dish before beginning to cook. This event assembles artistic, culinary, academic, and social ingredients and puts them both in and out of place.

Wish You Were Here is a cliched sentiment from souvenir postcards. We've been thinking about the pleaseures and privileges of travel, home, and hospitality: Who's here? Who's not? How compatible are the conventions of the theatre and the restaurant? What does it mean to travel? To have a home? How do food and performance enact globalization and localization? And are you going to finish that?

We know that in cooking, as in performance, mistakes only sometimes lead to disaster. During the first 20 years we have spent together, we both gave elaborate dinner parties and made humble barbecues, hosted crowds of 100 and improvised breakfast for visiting friends, developed elaborately themed parties and celebrated food from our garden and simple ingredients like homemade pickles and miso. We never treated these aesthetic endeavors as part of our professional work as practicing artists.

On our 20th anniversary, we decided to formalize a connection between our professional lives and our personal hospitality. Under the company name Spatula&Barcode, we have committed ourselves for the next 20 years to make at least one performance annually drawing on the aestetics we had previously reserved for domestic "entertaining."

The first of these took place in Zagreb last year. It happend at the end of a year-long round-the-world trip and so the event, called MISadventure, focused on travel and presence. Having been home for one year, now we are focusing on home and absence.

We're grateful to everyone here for contributing your ingredients, computers, ideas and presence to the shift, and also to concentric circles of contributors, starting with Konoba Nebuloza restaurant, the conference and shift hosts, other Croatian friends, and our guest telepresences from around the world.

We are indebted to performances and other influences from Richard Gough, Joseph Beuys, Marin Blazevic, Anothony Bourdain, Nicolas Bourriaud, Bertolt Brecht, Julia Child, Ping Chong, various Clarks (especially Danny, Julian, Rita and Melissa) crayfish and crawfish, Diego Felix, Geoffrey Hendricks, Francis Mallmann, New Year's in Havana, pho for breakfast, Ute Ritschel, street food and market stalls, Yue Wah grocery, Phillip Zarrilli, and countless folks who have visited or hosted us.

A PROJECT BY

Laurie Beth Clark and Michael Peterson

Rijeka, Croatia

4 September, 2010

HOSTS

Marin Blazevic, Una Bauer, Lada Cale-Feldman, Petra Corva, Alan Vukelic, Davor Miskovic

DINNER GUESTS OF HONOR

Ecuador: Marlon Barrios Solano

Argentina: Eduardo Santiere

Benin: Joseph Adande

South Africa: Thembinkosi Goniwe

India: Ravi Khote