«Food sums up and transmits a situation, it constitutes an information, it signifies...»
Roland Barthes
Speaking of Sissi's "dinners" without having lived them and taken part in them it's impossible, because they are sensory experiences that the artist offers to the audience calling it to share a unique and unrepeatable moment, of which only remains a picture taken before the culinary ceremonial begins. The variations designed to different places and consumed by the audience have been eight by now [...] where the artist's creativity expanded and became a real happening, made of smells, flavors, colors that caused a synaesthetic involvement and full participation of the senses. In fact, the array of food in these Sìssi's big still lifes plays the role of visual protagonist and narrative motor that really starts a process of transforrnation, unleashing in the observer the desire to enjoy that same food that makes up the work. There is in Sissi's dinners a cultural reappropriation of food dimension understood as a ritualistic way which connects to the idea of the sacred. Offering food to the audience, and then share the moment of eating without cutlery, with your hands, is for Sissi a way to consume food together in order to declare each one their own rituality, beyond the preset categories, and good rules of bon ton. [...] Sissi has a bold imagination that excogitates and draws tables and impossible menu, where the lard burrs become the fringes of the tablecloth, the marrowbones small bone embroidery, the pieces of nougat turreted towers and the wonderful colorful puddings transparent confessions made with jelly. Just read the menu of the dinners to get in a "mixture"of words, signs, shapes and materials that the audience likes to manipulate because already whetted in the taste and at the mercy of a multi-sensorial expectation. Sissi is really good at creating this "empathic osmosis" between the work and the user, she knows the arts of aesthetic seduction: her laid tables are a hymn to the five senses, to the shapes, the colors, the flavors, to the textural quality of food, to their composition exhibited with an impeccable set and each time more audacious. Dinner then becomes an all-absorbing performance that has much to do with the theater and the stage action, in which the audience is invited to participate directly and where the food is a variation in the way of inhabiting the body to which Sissi has accustomed us: a sculptural body made of food, which people can touch and eat, but even just watching, as in the case of the set of dishes, real bone skeleton on which the artist has built "clothes" of food. It's up to us to clear the laid tables, pick them clean and feed on the sumptuously prepared food, in the most lavish celebration of the appearance, to rethink of the substance of Sissi's speech: know your body by living it.
Maura Pozzati, Dinner motif: variation, in Sissi Bone motifs, curated by Maura Pozzati, Milan, Silvana Editoriale, 2016, pp 12-17
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