The project Fishdish Ritual, operates as a durational socio-plastic system in which food ceases to be nourishment alone and becomes a material grammar for living architecture. Structured through daily repetitions that explicitly reject repetition itself, the work establishes a ritualised economy of colour, matter, and time. Each dish functions as a unit of practice—an edible module—embedded in the urban metabolism of Madrid’s markets. In this sense, the project extends post-minimal and relational aesthetics into what might be termed alimentary ontology: a condition where consumption, production, and documentation collapse into a single performative act. The fish is not symbolic; it is infrastructural. It anchors the system to perishability, risk, and ethical immediacy. Colour, derived from vegetables and fruits, is neither decorative nor expressive but operational, functioning as a chromatic code that registers seasonality, availability, and bodily adaptation. The refusal of leftovers is crucial: waste is excluded not morally but structurally, positioning the work against extractive abundance and towards calibrated sufficiency. The installation is unstable by design, resisting museological capture and insisting on presence, digestion, and disappearance as its core formal attributes.
Within the framework of socioplastics, Fishdish Ritual can be read as a meshwork of micro-actions that collectively produce a living diagram of urban existence. The daily walk to the market, the selection of ingredients, the preparation, the eating, and the photographic registration constitute a closed yet porous loop. This loop echoes Mesh theory’s emphasis on interdependency and flow rather than objecthood. Here, architecture is not built but metabolised; space is activated through routine rather than monument. The hands holding fish, vegetables, and fruit—documented with consistent framing—become indices of scale and agency, situating the human body as both measure and medium. The market itself emerges as a distributed palette, offering “fresh colours” that are contingently assembled into temporary constellations. These constellations are political insofar as they negotiate global supply chains through local choice, translating abstract economies into tangible, sensorial decisions. The work’s serial logic recalls conceptual art’s systems aesthetics, yet its insistence on taste, smell, and ingestion radicalises that lineage, foregrounding vulnerability and care as aesthetic strategies rather than ancillary concerns.
Ultimately, Fishdish Ritual situates itself at the intersection of art, life, and governance, proposing a model of daily practice as critical infrastructure. It resists spectacle in favour of continuity, substituting the gallery with the kitchen and the market as primary sites of aesthetic production. The documentation—lists, dates, locations—reads like a ledger of lived intensity, transforming banal routine into a form of situated theory. In doing so, the work challenges dominant paradigms of sustainability that rely on abstraction and scale, offering instead a micropolitical ethics grounded in attention, restraint, and repetition-without-repetition. As an unstable installation, it remains permanently unfinished, open to extension, mutation, and refusal. Its strength lies precisely in this openness: a mesh of actions that binds colour, body, and city into a fragile yet resilient system. In the broader landscape of contemporary art, Fishdish Ritual stands as a rigorous proposition: that the most radical architectures may be those we eat, daily, without residue.
Lloveras, A. (2016) Fish Dish Ritual: 03/2016 Madrid. Available at: https://antolloveras.blogspot.com.es/2016/03/fish-dish-ritual-032016-madrid.html
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