Potato Talks

Live art perfromance, 2016-ongoing

“Every sphere of human activity -Even peeling a potato- can be a work of art, as long as it is a conscious act.”

Potato Talks Project, takes Beuys figure of speech—the act of peeling potatoes— literally, and centers around it a public performance with storytellers, potatoes, and accidental audience.

The Performance creates a situation that attempts to re-call attention to seemingly insignificant acts, to celebrate the ordinary, to uncover a new, yet altogether hold familiar aesthetics. Hence, the significance of how gestures become “signifier” holders, and symbol containers. Those pairings of stereotypes, daily gestures, and real life issues, creates a dialogue that ushers the many modes and alternatives for intimate discussions of how personal and collective identities could be pushed through the act of narration.

Potato Talks is a public performance project, staged in different cities and countries every time with a new different theme and new 10 people, that that artist goes with them through a process to make them Potato Talks storytellers.

Why Potatoes?

Potatoes are like stories they come from the land, they are familiar to the people in the street, yet the magic happens when those potatoes are brought from the closed doors of kitchens to the street, and start becoming the canvas for storytelling, just like its waxy and starchy properties, that offer an almost neutral canvas for many other flavours and textures to raise.

And! Potatoes have interesting stories of foodways, colonialism, famine and wars.

Every edition of Potato Talks has the same flow:

In a busy street, 10 storytellers peeling potatoes, opposite 10 chairs, for 2 hours. In the chairs opposite them will seat people in the street. Once a passerby sits on the chair, the storyteller starts will ask the person opposite him to help him by holding the peels, and recounts in a one-to-one interaction a story that peels through layers of the theme in focus.

After the story is finished, or even while it is being told, the listener is free to interact, comment, or even join in peeling a potato and tell their story, there is no time limit for this action. Once the passerby decides to leave, the storyteller goes back to peeling potatoes, until another passerby joins in, and the story is being told again.

While the performance is happening, the peeled potatoes, now lighter with stories, are sent to a cooking station onsite, and at the end of the performance, the potato based dish prepared is shared with everyone, creating a very special social moment of eating and togetherness!

Potato Talks, Thinking like a Mountain, Biennale Gherdëina, 2023

The Forth Edition, opened the ninth edition of the Gherdëina Biennale on 22 July 2023, responding directly to the curatorial theme proposed by Lorenzo Giusti. The stories of the ten storytellers living in Val Gherdëina, speak of mountains and paths, of migrations and returns, of wilderness and animals, mixing personal experiences and legends, myths and everyday stories, that connect the local context - the Dolomites and their valleys - with other mountains in Europe and the Mediterranean, embracing, within a single choral narration, the field of investigation - from North Africa to the Middle East - that Biennale Gherdëina 9 intends to make its own.