A Metabolic Procession

Abstract

"You are invited to a commemoration, an observance, of the bounties of the sea — resources that seem to us, problematically, practically endless. A meal of mussels, bivalve molluscs, cultivated through zero-input aquaculture from the nutrient rich, salty, coastal waters of Southern Portugal, becomes a ceremony and vigil for the exchanges we engage in when we eat foods from the sea. It is to be a communal meal, set out on architectural forms that reproduce the shell heaps, or “middens”, that ancient peoples left for contemporary archaeologists to interpret, also evoking funeral mounds, or “tumulus.”