In this workshop participants will work with variations on traditional eggless, Italian pasta doughs to learn handmade pasta techniques. The group will experiment with incorporating wild yeasts (i.e. sourdough) and less conventional flours to engage with themes of metabolics, exchange, and transformation. The workshop will explore the poetic and sculptural potential of the material as a means to better understand the relationships between form, material, body, and landscape inherent to cuisine. The workshop will begin with a talk to orient materially and theoretically, then collectively make and shape the dough, and end the workshop by cooking and tasting the creations with dinner prepared by Adriana accompanied by a curated wine selection.
The goal is not to become an expert pasta maker, but to develop through practice a critical understanding of a kind of traditional labor and its embedded histories. Pasta, or any traditional food-craft, can serve to cultivate an awareness of labor that conditionally includes the landscapes and ecologies that produce the raw ingredients as well as the people who perpetuate the tradition and the surrounding culture. In making pasta, participants can ask how engaging with traditional food-ways produces and re-produces relations between individuals or between humans and nature.
Adriana Gallo is a Brooklyn-based artist born in Milan and raised between Italy and the Northeastern United States. Her practice embodies and complicates ecologies of labor and outcomes take the form of installations, sculptures, texts, workshops, and meals