Famous for its parmesan cheese and prosciutto, Parma is offering up nourishment for the mind over the next three months with the first edition of its Gastronomy in Modern Art Festival (GNAM).
On the menu are a series of exhibitions in different venues across the city celebrating representations of food in modern and contemporary art through painting, photography, video installation and sculpture.
Artistic director Andrea Gambetta described the festival as "a smorgasbord of tempting titbits and intellectual libations, with chef-artists and artist-chefs proposing a long menu of cultural delicacies and food for the mind".
The main event is Foodscapes, at the ex-Cinema Trento until 6 January 2008, which explores concepts of food through the work of 40 international artists, from the sacred and formal to the animal and self-destructive.
Among the works on show are Belgrade-born Marina Abramovic's "The Onion" (1996), a brutal and harrowing video in which the performance artist eats a large raw onion as if it were an apple, tears streaming down her face and nose running while in a voiceover she complains about the anxieties of her life.
Bosnian artist Sejla Kameric, who lived through the war in Sarajevo, presents a more positive and poignant side to food in the photographic assemblage "The Basics" (2003), in which she appears with the bare essentials - two plastic containers of water in her hands and a round loaf of bread over her stomach - her face upturned to a light bulb, eyes closed and spiritually replete.
The exhibition does not shy away from the end product of eating, as in Gilbert & George s "Eat & Drink" (1997), a mixed media painting that shows the two British artists standing naked alongside faeces almost as tall as their bodies.
"Feeding is private and collective at the same time, something strictly personal and simultaneously public," said Hungarian curator Lorand Hegy, who is also Director of the Saint-Etienne Modern Art Museum in France.
DEATH ROW DINNERS RECREATED.
Smaller shows taking place elsewhere in the city include Last Supper, Celia A. Shapiro's photographic series of the meals requested by American death row prisoners before their execution, which makes its European debut at the Oratorio S. Ilario until 9 January.
The US photographer cooked and faithfully recreated the final meals right down to the prison-issue plastic trays, using a large-format camera to capture the images.
A pint of mint chocolate ice cream forms the last supper of Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City Bomber responsible for the deaths of 168 people in 1995 and executed in 2001.
A tray with a dozen mustardy hotdogs and two cans of cola belongs to John William Rook, who was executed in 1986 for beating a nurse to death six years earlier.
Shapiro plays with the confusing juxtaposition of that which is given and that which is taken away, and the inmates' choice of food offers a revealing profile of the social strata that end up on death row.
For Hungry Planet, on show at the Palazzo Eucherio Sanvitale until 20 December, US photographers Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio travelled across five continents and 24 countries to photograph families with all the food they consume for breakfast, lunch and supper over the course of a week.
The exhibition explores the different dining rituals of modern and traditional societies in places such as Bhutan, Australia, India and the United States.
Italian and Hollywood divas caught in the act of eating and shopping in 1960s and 1970s Rome by photoreporter Marcello Geppetti can be seen in the Dolce Vita exhibition at Fidenza Village Shopping Outlet until 25 November. The show includes the famous shot of actor Alberto Sordi in front of a plate of steaming spaghetti at the Da Meo Patacca restaurant in Trastevere, actress Audrey Hepburn in a headscarf ducking into a fruit shop, and writer-director Pier Paolo Pasolini at the Café de Paris on Via Veneto.
In addition to art shows, the next three months will see eating-related theatrical performances, book readings and film screenings take place across Parma, which has been the seat of the European Food Safety Authority since 2003.
"Our aim is to offer a contemporary modern vision of the topic through a wide-ranging programme, located right in the natural heart of the food valley," Gambetta said.
