Devorar Madrid, 2004

As a rehearsal for Eating the City, Melbourne, Ali&Cia created a 3 x 2m edible model of Madrid's historical centre, which was presented in the gallery Doméstico '03. Bárbara Ortíz designed the map and many collaborators were involved in cooking the city. Careful research was undertaken, not only in order to correctly recreate the city to scale, but also to find the most appropriate edible metaphors and solutions.

Some surprising discoveries were made by urbanophagists. The National Library was created out of a puff pastry dessert called 'a thousand pages' in Spanish (mil hojas) and the Casa de América consisted of a large variety of tropical fruits of South American origin. The Puerta de Alcalá was carefully modelled in white chocolate by bakers of El Horno de San Onofre. Streets of tapenade were lined with trees whose greenery was a squiggly green Asian cracker. Other buildings were made of Spanish omelette, empanada (a Spanish type of English Cornish pasty) and even sushi. In addition to the sky scrapers, height was also achieved with the suspension of several edible clouds.

The event culminated in a catharsis of urbanophagy for all those present, transformed into unbanophagists.

Video

Devorar Madrid(see video)

Video by Diego Vega for Ali&Cia

<< return to Urbanophagy: Eating the City