Mind, heart and body were fully provided for at the Delfina Foundation at its Appropriating the Moment event on Saturday (21 May). The evening kicked off with a hardcore intellectual discussion with Marseille-based psychoanalysts and performance art collectors Marc and Josée Gensollen, who grappled with the implications of owning the immaterial with writer, curator and performance specialist Adrian Heathfield and Delfina associate Teresa Calonje.
At one point the general chin-stroking was unexpectedly interrupted when Monsieur Gensollen suddenly reared up, spread out his arms and growled, “What do you think this is about?” It turned out that the eminent gentleman was spontaneously enacting a 2003 work by Tino Sehgal, who the Gensollens were among the first to support at the very beginning of the artist’s career.
There were more surprises in store at the dinner presented by Emma Smith, a Delfina artist associate who treated the Gensollens and appreciative guests to a meal devised from her current project, Recipes for Relationships. Working with a team of Cambridge University anthropologists and using recipes from the 17th century to the present, Smith created a sequence of dishes that took diners through the life cycle of a relationship.
The menu began with welcoming piña colada cocktails “for love and seduction” (apparently pineapple enhances the flavour of both male and female sexual excretions) followed by figs and cheese “for comfort and health”; gin and citrus posset for marriage; and roast chicken and root veg “for family union”(with the vegetarian option of a lentil-and-nut roast acknowledging the 17th-century belief that the male erection was achieved through trapped wind.)
Then there was a dessert of brioche pain perdu and strawberries served with spiced hot chocolate “for dotage” and hot milk “for rest and recuperation”. However, a mid-prandial discourse from M. Gensollen on the Freudian faecal symbolism of the artistic act, meant perhaps it wasn’t only the old-age associations that led to a number of the guests passing on the hot chocolate…