TRAILINGS

This maneuver extracts the practice of walking from the daily activities of the cook. We understand walking as the basic building-block of cooking: pacing, laps, foraging, hurriedness, retrieval, rush, detours, turns, leaps, caution, directness… An activity that is multiple.

Every series of steps carries its own signature, a style. Every step inscribes trajectories and spatializes. In conjunction, the step and the series form a maneuver. As we see it, this maneuver has no beginning or end, since the step quickly runs onto the page and turns into the letter, word, and sentence. With a proper leap of lightness, walking becomes writing, just as writing becomes mood, or atmosphere. 

Furthermore, walking determines the quality of the line (written, drawn, stepped). It provides specific properties to the movement and a set of dispositions to the mover. Maps of all sorts are created in order to extract essences of these line-qualities. The walking can be done by feet, hands, thoughts, utensils… Sometimes even the fingers have to dance and create their own lines.

Walking, then, becomes a spatial growth process as paths, roads, and even cities are cut (tread) into a landscape. Even the crystallization of molecules follows this procedure (epicurean swerve). Lines produce forms. Yet traces cannot fully capture the spatial practice; walking drives, tests, and transgresses with every step. In the short distance of a step, a long, un-mappable cosmos is cast. Mushroom maps of the forager-composer John Cage come as good templates for this approximation:

Our peripatetic cuisine incorporates wandering as its basis. An atmospheric movement, we are cast by the wind and struck - as if by lightning - by ideas and sensations. Our resulting creations carry the traces of the walk, its qualities diagramming every step.

This maneuver has led to a series of productions:
1. Soundings Postmortem
2. Fieldtrips
3. Maps
4. Epiphanies