adriana gallo

Adriana Gallo introduces audiences to a kaleidoscope of theory, history, and research through a workshop practice centered on pasta-making. In this conversation, we talk about searching for the right material, social relations, and both embracing and resisting identity. Born in Milan, she now resides in Brooklyn.

I hope you enjoy our conversation. It has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Artwork photos courtesy of the artist; artist portrait courtesy of Hannah Cash

Let’s start broad, can you give an overview of your practice?

In general, I would distill it down to a research-based art practice. Outcomes can include an installation, a sculpture, a meal, a workshop, texts. Often, I use materials that are ephemeral in some way. I use things that move between liquid and solid. Food comes up as a distillation of these broader research interests and is ultimately the sculptural form that I am most equipped to execute and the best at.

Why do you think that is?

I’ve been cooking more consistently than I’ve worked with any single material. I was born in Milan and grew up between Italy and the US. That maybe is the obvious answer, which is food has always been extremely important. I don’t think it’s just upbringing. I think it’s something inherent to the ways that sense is layered in food. It’s literally ingestible or digestible or comestible and it has a dimension that more conventional or traditional art materials don’t. Food has always been this easy way to understand complex dynamics. It feels more social or integrated into life in a way that fine art resists at times.

How did you decide to utilize food as a medium?

I had this idea that there was going to be this perfect material I hadn’t found yet. I’d make everything out of it. It would be exactly as wet and hard and malleable and big and small. All the while, I was cooking because I’ve always cooked. I’ve always read a lot, researched a lot. I speak Italian so I have access to another branch of food knowledge or literature. I was developing what I saw as separate skill sets. I ultimately saw that the way I was approaching acquisition or practice of food knowledge was that material. It was that thing that I was trying to make an archival or non-edible version of.

Your work most commonly takes the form of “pasta workshops.” What do those look like?

I do an artist talk and lecture that is specific to whatever theme I have selected for that workshop. It could be ecologies, morphologies, territories, something like this. I have a presentation with a bunch of images. I give permission to absorb as much or as little as they want. They understand where I’m coming from. Then I demonstrate how to make a dough. The people are responsible for making it themselves. Everyone’s kneading together, everything rests, and then we shape. I move around and answer questions about the presentation or help with the shaping. Meanwhile I prepare accompanying sauces and dishes for dinner. We then boil this huge pile of pasta, sit down, and eat together. People seem to like it. People make it again, which is the most important part, I think.

Is it the most important part?

I think so. It’s perpetuated in some way. They’re given permission to incorporate it into their living practice, whatever that is, even as non-artists. It’s democratic access to practice, rather than democratic access to art as a consumable.

I’m interested in the relationship between you and your audience. With the workshops, you require engagement and the interactions are part of the work, as opposed to your writing which is one directional.

It never quite felt like a performance. It was too relational; people are too implicated. The only performance aspect is people watching me set up the parameters. Everyone else executes. I don’t love the idea of there being a discrete audience and performer in that dynamic.

Would it be fair to say that it’s akin to a teacher-student dynamic?

Not even, because I try to avoid the role of expert. It’s not super productive to me. And people bring their own skillset or understanding of relationships and their body and how to interface with food or material. The point is for it to be mutually didactic.

I think about the kitchen as a domestic laboratory: setting up these experiments or conditions for something to flourish. You’re exerting control or manipulating the context but it’s an implied presence, more than active performing. The workshops feel like they are becoming closer to actual works rather than just artist talks.

What is it about pasta specifically?

I’ve been thinking about it for a long time, and it’s also temporally the right amount of time. Dough-based workshops are extremely productive because they are so tactile. They’re not very technology or tool intensive. Not everyone needs to have a hot plate in front of them. It’s very achievable. You just need a flat surface and some flour and water, at the bare minimum.

Also, everybody knows what pasta is, or they think they know. It’s a nice Trojan horse. If your audience is the public, it’s a great way to get somebody in that room to begin with. If it were a more eccentric or convoluted product, it might not be as interesting.

How do you decide what to talk about?

There are a few modules that always stay. There’s always a history of pasta: how it’s made, how it used to be made, what it’s made of. For a more ecological focus, I talk about the species of wheat and the mutual domestication of humans and wheat, as an embodied part of highly industrial pasta making. Even a GMO wheat is highly relational and embedded. If we’re talking about morphology, both linguistic and biologic, what if you applied syntax to pasta forms or to gestures that produce pasta forms? Or what if you applied a biologic morphological lens and looked for analogous forms in nature that appear in edible products? I talk about labor a lot but expanding labor to include non-human actors, which is a crazy thing to say to a bunch of people that came for a pasta workshop. I’ve started to understand people come for that now.

You’re taking these very theoretical . . .

They’re not kitchen ideas.

If something is not totally available to you, I think that’s fine. But you shouldn’t feel repelled by it. If you can see it even a little bit, if you can see it from the outside, if you can sort of walk around it, I think that’s productive.

You have a rigorous relationship to research. Can you talk about that? How does it work with and shift with the workshops?

For me to work through an idea, I will simultaneously be making, reading, writing, cooking. All of those are happening at the same time. They all reveal different things about the same train of thought. It allows me to create actual relationships and connections between ideas instead of just forcing a connection for proximity. Instead of just saying, this connects to this, I can prove it through practice.

The workshop is my attempt at making a diorama, a miniature version of my process, available to other people to try out. Like with my writing, it gives me a way of presenting research and information as simultaneous as its production. I’m not just doing research and then producing an object that lives on its own without context or without the support of that research. I want that information to be available or visible.

I think other sculptors or artists are maybe more adept at having objects communicate that. I have never been able to fully imbue an artistic product, like an object or an installation, that does that to my satisfaction.

But you do have objects in your practice, so tell me a bit about them.

They’re all artifacts of things. I will make molds and then cast them in other materials. Molds of bread sculptures; casts of those breads. Molds of hide-a-key rocks, which I use often, are already molds of non-rocks. I do a lot of wax. I’ve done marzipan casts and hand-painted marzipan. The same forms come up again and again. Which I find, with that idea of morphology or syntax, very useful to have a vocabulary and modules to move around.

When you’re in your studio then, what does that look like?

I come here if I need to make something. If I need to form a bunch of wax. If I need to do something that I need a studio space for, and not a kitchen for. But I'm not sitting here thinking.

My dream studio space is probably a studio apartment with a kitchen.

With your research, do you feel like you’re trying to go closer towards an answer or is it a constant expansion outward?

It’s treating things like nodes and finding a way to connect those nodes to other nodes. It is multi-directional in that way. The more I work the more I find relationships between those interests and materials and lines of inquiry. Everything seems to be in relation to everything else.

The expansiveness of your topics is in many ways reflected in the refusal to stick to one form.

I’m comfortable with a certain level of individual authorship. I have to be, that’s my fine art background. There’s the implication of a singular voice in contemporary art—a single person who is filtering or re-presenting that information. I don’t mind that as the starting point. It gives me space to play because the assumption is that there is some sort of central coherence to it. It allows for these materially distinct modalities to coexist and people accept it as true. My goal is generally to diffuse that in the output.

You are the constant throughout.

I had an established interest in so-called fine art or craft or art historical tradition. I also had a simultaneous personal interest in food and plants and animals. Finding the ways in which they overlap has been the way that I guide a lot of my research.

I don’t think I could express all of those interests purely through writing or culinary practice or artistic practice. I’ve tried siloing them off and it doesn’t work. If there’s an endpoint, it’s a format that allows for all of those things to coexist at once. But I don’t think there’s one thing. I’ll keep trying different versions and they’ll be effective to varying degrees.

Let’s shift to language. You use a very scientific vocabulary to speak about your practice—“outcomes,” “modalities,” “nodes,” or “laboratory.” Even the workshop format itself. Why are you drawn to this type of vocabulary around your practice?

The answer is actually very simple. [Karl] Marx is very important to me and that deep analytical approach and critical breakdown of dynamics. All of a sudden a small thing feels very large again. You get up really close to an idea and it starts to explode outwards because it’s connected to everything. That sublime quality that I’ve always been aware of—from a child it was something I felt very deeply—I now can name and speak about and understand, in a way used to feel overwhelming or unfathomable.

Do you mean interconnectedness?

The idea of an individual object or material or food being everything all the time all at once. It’s connected to literally everything, its time scale is huge. I’m able to access that intensity in a way that I can understand or process appropriately.

Is Marx the starting point for your current practice?

I encountered it rigorously in the context of the environment and ecology. I had a really lovely professor, an ecological philosopher, who slipped in a lot of reading into a class on Ecological Aesthetics. That was very sticky for me, in a way that maybe just encountering it in an economics or philosophy context might not have been. It was very grounded and I found it really easily to apply. I find encounters in context very useful, which is why I give people the opportunity to encounter it in workshops or in my writing. It is grounded in a very sensual and sensible thing, which is something you eat. Food is a pretty effective descriptor of those relationships—it’s political, environmental, physical, all of these things at the same time. You can talk about that sublime explosive quality in a very mundane object.

When you mentioned “pasta as a microcosm” in one of your essays, that really distilled for me the way you use food to ultimately trace so many intersecting conditions.

If I don’t think about it or try to work through it a little bit, I would be very sad all of the time. What would I do with that energy? What would happen to me?

Part of this interview series is that I’m asking each artist to direct me to the next. So, who is an artist working today that you are intrigued by, and what is it about their practice you’re intrigued by?

Emma Safir’s practice and research is exciting to me in its rigorous interrogation of labor through materials and forms that re-present and problematize hierarchies of labor. I am interested in her approach of engaging with highly ornate and specialized crafts as something between an autodidact and apprentice to long standing traditions, remixing those skills with a conditional interest in technology and the artifacts of modernism.

Published April 7, 2024