EL QUESO

A show-kaes night
Fri, Novem­ber 25 2022, 17:00 — 20:00 ///
for­mer Wirtshaus zur Schießhalle, Waldeg­gstraße 116, Linz ///

In the show-kaes El Que­so, qujOchÖ and friends research the true nature of the “Cacio e Pepe”, through an artis­tic explo­ration of the pale-yel­low-to-intense­ly-coloured-mirabel­lic substance.
A series of Käs-stud­ies, dou­ble-blind exper­i­ments and rad­i­cal research process­es on the essence of the Käsessenz will be the main course of the evening.

With:
qujOchÖ, Avril Cor­roon, Ste­fan Brand­mayr, Alice Strete, Ivo Cer­wen­ka, Julia Nüßlein, Davide Bevilac­qua, Eva Maria Dreisiebner

El Queso

For mil­lions of years, man thought the moon was made of cheese. In 1969, we went there and dis­cov­ered it was made of rock. We haven’t been back since.

The facets of cheese are as diverse as its vari­ety; they com­bine cul­ture with sci­ence, eco­nom­ics with chem­istry, crafts­man­ship with pol­i­tics. In a good cheese, every hole, no mat­ter how small, is filled with sto­ries and His­to­ry. From soft to hard, young to old, mild to spicy – there is a cheese for every occasion.

Cheese is a mys­te­ri­ous mat­ter that solves any polar­iza­tion. In its cre­ation process, the denat­u­ra­tion of a col­loidal fat-water emul­sion — bet­ter known as milk – frees up the rad­i­cal ten­sion between its two unmix­able com­po­nents. An alchemic process­es finds a new del­i­cate bal­ance. The result is a sol­id sub­stance that car­ry its mag­ic prop­er­ties way beyond its pro­duc­tion tech­nique, mould­ing over var­i­ous areas of human activ­i­ty, from art to philosophy.

Already in the time of clas­si­cal phi­los­o­phy, Epi­cu­rus found out that a sin­gle piece of cheese has the prop­er­ty of fill­ing a per­son more than a whole meal. The obvi­ous ques­tion is: which cheese was it? Per­haps the Camem­bert known for dis­tort­ing the space-time con­tin­u­um, the same that ini­ti­at­ed Dalì’s “Per­sis­tence of Mem­o­ry”…? Aris­tote­les had a more fun­da­men­tal intu­ition on the aether­ic sub­stance of the lunar body, prob­a­bly only fail­ing to recog­nis­ing its root with­ing the lac­tose matters.

As cheese seems to be fun­da­men­tal­ly molten in the essence of every­thing, only anoth­er metaphisi­cal­ly rich sub­stance can keep the pace and serve the quest of the Que­so. Recall­ing the words of the the­o­rist Dino For­mag­gio – “Art is every­thing that humans call Art” – it seems that, once again, only Art can save human from com­plete meltdown.

Participant Artists

Ste­fan Brandmayr
Ste­fan Brand­mayr selects and put togeth­er, he dis­as­sem­bles and orga­nizes, he forms and per­forms. His approach is always process-ori­ent­ed. His artis­tic start­ing point is nev­er a con­cept but hap­tic work com­bined with research. Brand­mayr often deals with pic­tures of mas­culin­i­ty and con­nects an analy­sis of gen­der roles with basic para­me­ters of con­tem­po­rary art pro­duc­tion. (Gudrin Ratzinger)
https://www.stefanbrandmayr.net/
@stefanbrandmayr/

Alice Strete
Alice Strete (1991) is a Roman­ian media artist/researcher based in Rot­ter­dam. She is a mem­ber of Varia and a board mem­ber of BioB­ulk­Bende food co-operative.
http://vvvvvvaria.org/~strt/

Ivo Cer­wen­ka
ivocerwenka.at

Avril Cor­roon
Avril Cor­roon is an Irish visu­al artist based in Lon­don. She works with mov­ing image, per­for­mance, and sculp­ture to exam­ine pre­car­i­ous liv­ing, inequity and how archi­tec­ture man­i­fests gov­er­nance. She has made cheese from tox­ic black mould in hous­ing, has turned a gallery into a car deal­er­ship and covert­ly filmed labour con­di­tions in her hos­pi­tal­i­ty job. Cur­rent­ly she is work­ing on ‘Got Damp’ a research and devel­op­ment project with TACO Gallery in Thames­mead, explor­ing qual­i­ties of damp hous­ing as both harm­ful and live­ly material.
avrilcorroon.com
@avcorroon