<figure><img src="image_185.png" /><figcaption>5. Almanach des Gourmands' frontispice</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_186.png" /><figcaption>6. Grimod's business card</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_187.png" /><figcaption>7. Engraving of the "fameux repas"</figcaption></figure>

is a theatre, whose kitchen is the
backstage, and the table, the stage.
In this theatre, there has to be a
layout; on this stage, there has to be
sets; in this kitchen, there has to be
a plot."

This way of organising a meal has
a history, which is divided between
France and Russia, as the French-
style dinner and the Russian-style
dinner are two completely opposite
things. The French-style dinner
is more like an exhibition, where
everything is served at the same
time so as to make an immediate,
striking impression—I will come
back later to the concept of the
tableau vivant in this regard—while
the Russian-style dinner is set out,
and this takes place in the middle
of the 18th century, sequentially. In
other words, it unfolds in time. Why
is this? On the one hand, to eat
warm dishes: beautiful dressing is
worthless when the flavour is gone.

172 The beautiful dishes are to be enjoyed hot, although

in fact, the dishes were mostly cold,
because they were laid out to be
admired.

Image 1

This illustration perhaps best
captures this 18th-century spirit,
with Stanley Kubrick and *Barry Lyndon*²,
where we have perhaps
the quintessence of this 18th-
century spirit. Maybe that is
what set me on the path of trying
to understand the connection
between night and gathering
around a common endeavour,
namely dinner.

You all know the anecdote wherein
Kubrick used NASA-engineered
lenses, fast enough to capture
very dark sets, simply because
he wanted everything naturally lit
with wax candles. He was able to
find that lens, to in fact capture the
meaning bestowed by candlelight.
Light connects people around a
table at night, as we see in several
instances in this film, where the

meal is presented aesthetically as
well. Night operates a special type
of refocusing, a condensation of
attention around what we are going
to ingest. And this is not irrelevant.

Image 2

To appreciate the pleasures of the
flesh free from the notion of sin,
that is to say, no longer reduced
to the idea of greediness, which
interferes with the pleasures of taste.
It is a moment when, in the wake
of the French Revolution, we can
completely undo the ties between
church and state and give ourselves
to our hearts' content.

Alexandre Balthazar Laurent Grimod
de la Reynière, today, is much less
well-known than someone like Brillat-
Savarin. When we say 'gastronomy',
we think of Brillat-Savarin, and
not Grimod. Grimod was the son
of a Fermier général (a high-up tax
official). With such wealth, Grimod
could invent a life for himself
commensurate with his ambitions.

Image 3+4

Grimod has gone down in history
for a book, or a series of books,
called *The Gourmets' Almanac*,
which is the ancestor of all
food criticism today. Grimod is
remembered as the first who dared
to take up the pen and decide
to make and unmake certain
reputations. He calibrated a path, a
particular relationship to food.

Grimod invented a contraption
consisting of a large iron pipe with
one end placed to his right and
the other by the ear of the chef. In
this way, the orders flew and were
transmitted with the speed of
thought. One sees Grimod at the
table while at the same time turning
around and perhaps saying, "More
salt!" or who knows what!

Image 5+6

The critic properly 'with his hands
in the sludge'. Another image, the
'meditations of a gourmand', where
a pyramid can be seen behind
him with a large quantity of quality
products—the 'audience
of a gourmand'. We really

see the staging of a character who
represents himself with pen in hand,
evaluating what he is being served,
and no doubt refusing what was not
the custom to consume.

Image 7

Grimod is 25 years old and decides
one fine evening to host a party, but
not just any party! Guests receive a
small notice:

"You are invited to attend
the dinner-collation of Myself,
Alexandre Balthazar Laurent Grimod
de la Reynière, squire, lawyer at
Parliament, member of the Academy
of the Arcades in Rome, free
associate of the Museum of Paris,
and editor of the dramatic section
of the Journal de Neufchâtel, which
will take place at his home, rue des
Champs-Élysées, on the first day of
February 1783.

We will do our best to
receive you according to your merits,
and without flattering ourselves,
ensure that you are fully satisfied,
and we dare to assure you as of
today that, with regard to oil and
pig, there will be nothing left to be
desired.

We will meet at 9:30 p.m.
for dinner at 10.

You are urgently
requested not to bring a dog or a
valet, as the service is to be carried
out by ad hoc servants."³

What is really striking is that this
little invitation was set on white
paper, edged in black, like a funeral
announcement; and in fact, it was a
funeral announcement! I shall bring
you little by little into this long meal.

Grimod invited people to a
special night-time meal, organised
to his specifications. This meal took
place by candlelight, and guests
were seated around a catafalque (a
type of funeral decoration). From
there, they are supposed to see
Grimod, followed by his assistant
cooks. Grimod made sure that each
of his guests was picked up at their
house. They were then taken on
a tour of Paris for an hour, vague,
very vague, until they forgot exactly
where they were. It was a form of
conditioning to prepare each guest.
It was night, and guests arrived in a
dark antechamber, were then sent into another antechamber, much more brightly lit, and then, a little dazzled, were plunged back into darkness. The guests taking part in the meal did not know exactly what would happen next. They did not know what they were eating, just that it was food. So, the mystery of this meal is that we do not know what they ate. History remains quiet in that respect, although there is a 19th-century writer who speculated on what they might have eaten, which may give us a vague idea of what it might have been.

The idea is to have an audience that is willing to eat a particular meal. Grimod, not content with this effect, sent out other invitations to much more ordinary people to join in a gallery surrounding the room, overlooking it, so that they could watch the guests eating at the table. A sort of specular device, with the public being watched. And those eating were in fact on display. So, it actually becomes a little more complicated.

Here is one of the reviews. Restif de La Bretonne, author of *Nuits de Paris*, in which we discover a kind of underground world of the capital with Grimod de la Reynière, speaks about a moment later in the second supper when there was an imitation of Chinese shadow puppets: “After everyone had partaken in these various drinks, we passed into a room totally devoid of lights, in which a magic lantern was demonstrated, after which the guests withdrew”.<fnref n="3" />

There is something deeply interesting in the very idea of a meal that lends itself to sensory experimentation through all the senses; that is, not only are we tasting something we cannot even recognise, it is the famous example of Descartes vs. the pineapple. In the 18th century, the pineapple is a product only recently discovered, but Descartes states: “No, we already have that, we would be perfectly able to describe its taste”, 174 but it is so different that in fact we would not be

able to describe it. It is necessary to have known it to know how to describe it and to determine a particular place for it in the sum of our knowledge.

Imagine these people plunged in the dark, discovering something they cannot even recognise, and then being exposed to the public eye, and moreover with this new science of the image projected with the magic lantern...

Several people in the 19th century remembered this scene. It is necessary to understand why it struck people's minds, namely because on the one hand Grimod earned quite the reputation after his first supper. There was a second one that was a little less successful. And 35 years later, even though Grimod felt weak, he held another supper, but this time with a real announcement. He invited people to his funeral, that is, his wife invited her friends to his funeral. A funeral that he simulated: he lay in a coffin in the middle of the room while the guests were next door in a chapel, then a side door opened, and they discovered that Grimod was not dead!

There is a kind of myth of the funeral feast, which made him become famous. And this funeral feast had to be appreciated, according to him, precisely in terms of the aesthetic of a *tableau vivant*, namely an aesthetic of seizure, of suspense. The climax arrives, and we pause at the image we are supposed to retain. As others have understood, this aesthetic will subsequently be called the aesthetic of the effect anticipating the movement of the viewer, wanting exactly the point of this aesthetic enjoyment to arrive, and becoming a kind of total work of art.

This notion of total work of art, perhaps the quickest to grasp it was another writer who rewrote Grimod de la Reynière's supper, that is, Joris Karl Huysmans. In *À rebours* (1884), a sort of encyclopaedia of dandyism of that time, Des

Esseintes decides to retire from worldly life, but before retiring, he holds a last supper, described below:

[Des Esseintes] “acquired the reputation of an eccentric, which he enhanced [...] by giving famous dinners to men of letters, one of which, a revival of the 18th century, celebrating the most futile of his misadventures, was a funeral repast.

In the dining room, hung in black and opening on the transformed garden with its ash-powdered walks, its little pool now bordered with basalt and filled with ink, its clumps of cypresses and pines, the dinner had been served on a table draped in black, adorned with baskets of violets and scabiouses, lit by candelabra from which green flames blazed, and by chandeliers from which wax tapers flared.

To the sound of funeral marches played by a concealed orchestra, nude negresses, wearing slippers and stockings of silver cloth with patterns of tears, served the guests.

Out of black-edged plates they had drunk turtle soup and eaten Russian rye bread, ripe Turkish olives, caviar, smoked Frankfurt black puddings, game with sauces that were the colour of liquorice and blacking, truffle gravy, chocolate cream, puddings, nectarines, grape preserves, mulberries and black-heart cherries; they had sipped, out of dark glasses, wines from Limagne, Roussillon, Tenedos, Val de Peñas and Porto, and after the coffee and walnut brandy had partaken of kvas, porter and stout.

The farewell dinner to a temporarily dead virility—this was what he had written on invitation cards designed like bereavement notices.”<fnref n="4" />

The literary rewriting of Grimod's supper by Huysmans highlights a detail that history does not provide, that is, the meal was entirely colour-based. The chromatic meal reveals 175 that its whole purpose was to control the senses and

elicit a particular effect. Such is the aim of the theory of dandyism, as determined by Huysmans following Baudelaire: even within his plate, the man-god shall not be surprised and will wield complete mastery, in his own little world, over his spectators.

Recently, a French artist, Emmanuel Giraud, understood this accurately when he created the performance called *Devenir gris, or Remembrances from Grimod de la Reynière's funeral feast* (2009), where, based on Grimod with the help of Huysmans, he transformed a historical meal into a performance in Montpellier. He relived this funeral feast with guests chosen in exactly the same way for their particular qualities, and the goal of the game was then to film their reactions. The menu is not given, they discover it little by little, and then they are filmed. And the more they are filmed, the more they become alive, the vaguer the memory of the food becomes. This performance subsequently gave rise to many others.

<footnote n="1">1. Aristotle. *De Anima* (Leiden & New York: E.J. Brill, 1994).</footnote>

<footnote n="2">2. Barry Lyndon, directed by Stanley Kubrick (1975; Burbank, CA: Warner Bros.).</footnote>

<footnote n="3">3. Quoted by Louis de Bachaumont, *Mémoires historiques, littéraires et critiques de Bachaumont* (Paris: Léopold Collin, 1808), 49.</footnote>

<footnote n="4">4. Nicolas Restif de la Bretonne, *Les Nuits de Paris*, t. III (City: Publisher, Year [1780]), 89.</footnote>

<footnote n="5">5. Joris-Karl Huysmans, *Against the Grain* (New York: Dover Books, 1969 [1884]), 22.</footnote>

<footnote>Julien Zanetta, postdoctoral student involved in the research project “Bonger comprend tout ce qui est beau”, a study and critical edition of Redon-Bonger’s correspondence, studied modern French and comparative literature at the University of Geneva, where he defended a PhD dissertation in 2014 on the role of memory in Baudelaire’s art criticism.</footnote>

<footnote>His postdoctoral research focuses on the issue of genre in painters’ biographies in 19th-century France, from Stendhal to Paul Valéry. He is also interested in the work of the critic and art historian Théophile Silvestre. He has translated and edited a collection of essays on literature and aesthetics by British writer William Hazlitt. In 2010 he received the Arditi Prize for French Literature and the Hélène and Victor Barbour Prize for his Master’s thesis *La mémoire et son double – Conceptions de la mémoire dans le Salon de 1846, le Salon de 1859 et le peintre de la vie moderne de Charles Baudelaire*. He is the author of a book entitled *Baudelaire, la mémoire des arts and of numerous publications and literary articles, and has organised conferences in Geneva, Lausanne and at the Sorbonne in Paris.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_188.png" /></figure>

Domingo is a collective of four artists, Doris Hardeman, Jerlyn Heinzen, Salomé Ziehli, and Natacha de Oliveira, who came together in an attempt to explore the social space through performative interactions around the serving, sharing and consumption of food.

Through a desire to explore the meanings of 'home' and 'collectivity' in our contemporary society, the collective began by appropriating the notion of home through one of its most familiar frameworks: the dinner table. The usage of food as a means to create a generous, hospitable and domestic environment seemed to them one of the most logical approaches to exploring the idea of home, and therefore the act of sharing food became the starting point of their performative events.

What started out as organised lunches and dinners, for guests who were literally 'picked out of a hat', predominantly addressing the concepts of domesticity and respective cultural traditions, rapidly triggered questions of sociability that transcended the realm of the dining table.

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SCÈNES
NIGHT
Nocturnal

&
Exhibition

DE

NUIT
ARCHITECTURE
at
f'ar
Lausanne

### Curators:

Javier Fernández Contreras

Youri Kravtchenko

### Assistant:

Manon Portera

### Students:

Taomei Bengone

Shana Bennett

Rui-Filipe Bernardes Da Silva

Tania Bersier

Audrey Besanceney

Emma Birbaud

Elisa Cuddré-Mauroux

Rafael Donoso

Mélanie Ducrey

Noémi Dux

Alizé Fassier

Pauline Gueissaz

Clémence Labancherie

Shanna Lancian

Emma Launay

Gaïane Legendre

Clara Losey

Deborah Marolf

Raphaëlle Marzolf

Antoine Matta

Astrid Mayer

Camille Nemethy

Thu Trang Nguyen

Julie Reeb

Nemo Reitz

Annika Resin

Nora Rhyner

### Guests:

Matthieu Bareyre

Isabelle Corten

Collectif Domingo

Pol Esteve

Martin Kohout

Octave Perrault

Sukdhev Sandhu

Stalker/Osservatorio Nomade

Daniel Zamarbide

Julien Zanetta

f'ar commitee 2019:

Davide di Capua

Clémentine Coléou-Colomb

Maria João Cunha

Marc Frochaux

Vittorio di Giuseppe

Cécile Klaus

Julien Perret

Grégoire Polika

Simon Zangger

### Photos:

© HEAD - Genève, Baptiste Coulon

© Jerlyn Jeinzen

© Lea Kloos

© Dylan Perrenoud

### Proofreading:

Alexander Craker

Natacha de Oliviera

Nicole Genberg

### Book design:

Studio Nüssli+Nuessli

### Editors:

Javier Fernández Contreras

Youri Kravtchenko

Manon Portera

© HEAD-Genève

© Ediciones Asimétricas, 2021

C/ Cartagena, 164. Of. B

28002 Madrid

www.edicionesasimetricas.com

ISBN: 978-84-17905-69-9

Depósito Legal: M-11201-2021

Impreso en España / Printed in Spain

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Javier Fernández Contreras (1982) is an architect, associate professor and the dean of the Department of Interior Architecture at HEAD – Genève (HE-SO). His work explores the relationship between architecture, representation and media, with a specific focus on the role of interiors in the construction of contemporaneity.

Contreras studied architecture at TU Delft and ETSA Madrid, where he graduated with an M.Arch degree in 2006, and completed a PhD in Architectural Theory in 2013, summa cum laude. He has taught architectural design at different institutions, including ETSAM in Spain, XJTLU in China and ETH Zurich in Switzerland. Contreras is the author of the books *Fragmentos de Planta y Espacio* (Ediciones Asimétricas, 2018), *The Miralles Projection: Thinking and Representation in the Architecture of Enric Miralles* (Applied Research + Design Publishing, 2020), *Manifesto of Interiors: Thinking in the Expanded Media* (HEAD – Publishing, 2021), and co-editor of *Herbarium of Interiors* (Arbis-Volume, 2020), a special collaboration between HEAD – Genève, India Mahdavi, and Volume magazine. His critical essays have been published in various books and specialised journals, including *Massilia Annuaire des Études Corbuséennes*, Marie-José Van Hee Architecten, India Mahdavi, *Perspectives in Metropolitan Research*, 306090, *Drawing Matter*, *Bitácora*, and *RADDAR*.

His work has earned him awards in various international competitions, including the Concentrico Architecture and Design Festival 2020, Europan 11 Cerdanyola del Vallés, and Europan 10 Bottrop. With HEAD – Genève (HE-SO), recent distinctions include the Brands and Communication Red Dot Award 2020 and the Innovation Frame Award 2020 for the Space Duality project, as well as a Design Prize Switzerland 2019 nomination for the #Looslab project.

Youri Kravtchenko (1984) is an architect, a teacher and the co-coordinator of the MA programme in the Department of Interior Architecture at HEAD – Genève (HE-SO). Inspired by the narrativity and theatricality that spaces can communicate, he blends together in his two complementary practices, narration and construction, to build projects that are as much scenographic as architectural. Nostalgic as much as pragmatic, he mixes materials and eras, combining opposites in atmospheric works that are often cinematic. In this sense, he constantly seeks coherence in the irrational and the functional in a good story.

After studying at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, Kravtchenko founded his own office, YKRA, in 2012. His practice focuses on the dialogue between the built heritage and a legible contemporary intervention on the one hand, and the integration of interior design/architecture into architecture on the other, all this around four concepts in which he has specialised: welcoming, working, living and showing. As of 2017, he began teaching around the notions of space, image and fiction.

For the past 10 years, he has carried out more than 80 projects in Switzerland (especially Geneva) and throughout Europe. After winning the SIA Prize for the best Master's project in Switzerland in 2011, he started working at the Swiss Institute in Rome in 2016 where he is now a fellow. In 2019, he was simultaneously nominated for the Swiss Art and the Swiss Design Awards.

Manon Portera (1992) is an assistant in the Department of Interior Architecture at HEAD – Genève (HE-SO) and the co-founder of the interior architecture office aproà, which focuses on light and materials using a sustainable approach.

Portera studied Interior Architecture at HEAD – Genève (HE-SO) where she graduated with a BA in 2015. She completed an MA degree in Fine Arts with a specialisation in Space Design at Konstfack, University of Arts, Crafts and Design, Stockholm, in 2018. In 2016 she developed the Foam me project, exhibited at the Rossana Orlandi Gallery in Milano, the Nov Gallery and the Design Days in Geneva. In 2017 she was a finalist in the Commonweal Housing's design competition together with Cecile-Diama Samb. Her interest in the sustainable practice of interior architecture has led her to work with the Rotor collective in Brussels, with whom she also taught at the Royal College of Art in London in 2019.