Neapolitan artist Sergio de Rosa makes photos out of Italy’s favorite food, spaghetti. His work also features other pasta shapes and another food esteemed by the Italians, rice. For more images, visit today’s online version of the La Repubblica newspaper and watch the slide show featured under “immagine.”
While everyone else has spent so the last months talking about Damien Hirst’s $99,000,000 diamond encrusted skull, For the Love of God, visitors and residents of Venice are face-to-face with another skeletal momento mori that’s spookily floating in their Grand Canal, in front of the Palazzo Grassi exhibition hall.
Subodh Gupta’s 1000 kilo sculpture, Very Hungry God, is made out of aluminum pots and pans and it first apparated last fall in Paris in the Eglise Saint-Bernard church during Nuit Blanche. It’s currently on show in Venice as part of an exhibition of Francois Pinault’s collection.
In an interview on the Saatchi Gallery Blog, Gupta explains the forces that motivated him to craft this symbol of death out of objects that are used to sustain life:
The piece in Venice, “Very Hungry God”, was made in 2006 for the Nuit Blanche annual all-night festival in Paris. My work was conceived to be shown in a church in Barbes on the outskirts of Paris which is largely inhabited by an immigrant population.
I made the work in response to the stories I read in the news about how soup kitchens in Paris were serving food with pork so that Muslims would not eat it. It was a strange and twisted form of charity that did not continue for long but raised conflicting ideas of giving and the way we have become now.
Outside the church I served vegetarian daal soup as a form of “prasad” (in India when you go to a temple or a guduwara you are offered food with the blessing). I liked the mix of the Catholic church and my intervention using a symbol that many artists have used before - the skull - and its many connotations.
‘Very Hungry God’ is like a vanity, but also the idea of food and the utensils is very much part of my language dealing with ideas of the everyday and turning them into iconic symbols.
The piece is on exhibit until 11 November 2007.
We’re totally taken with Momaboma’s Recycle EstEthic! The Milan-based company seeks to invert the world by employing all sorts of discarded materials in the making of ultra-chic bags. Tape measures are woven into striking saddlebags (see above) while old record albums become eye-catching totes.
Sponges and old magazines are standard materials at Momaboma, and they’re even producing bags that are crafted out of first-grade homework assignments and lined with vintage t-shirts (see below).
For tourists in Rome, the most obvious way to cool off on a hot summer day is to head to the nearest gelateria. Romans (and tourists in the know) consider other options as well. Gelato is fabulous, but when it’s really really hot, Romans will forgo the creamy cone or cup in favor of something even more refreshing, the grattachecca.
The grattachecca is essentially a snow cone. It’s shaved ice heaped into a cup and topped with sweet syrups, fruit juice, and sometimes even vodka or Campari.
The icy treat has a long history in Rome. A New York Times article suggests that the etymology of the word itself - grattachecca - provides an explanation of the origins of this summer delight:
The word grattachecca is derived from two Italian words: gratta, meaning to scrape, and checca, a diminutive in Roman dialect for Francesca. The story goes that, around the turn of the century, a woman named Francesca invented this summer treat for her 11 children and spent most of her time thereafter responding to their relentless pleas that she scrape more ice.
Francesca may have built up her biceps by spending a lot of time scraping ice, but so do the young men that do the arduous the job now at Rome’s many grattachecca stands. They use an instrument that resembles a carpenter’s wood planer, a pialla, to shave huge blocks of ice, and their bulging muscles attest to the number of times they repeat the action each and every day, for lines can be exceedingly long, especially on weekend evenings when Rome’s hip and happening are headed down the banks of the Tiber River for dinner and drinks.
Most of the grattachecca stands around Rome line busy streets and their signs often sport names like Sor Pino or Sora Mirella (Sor and Sora are the Roman dialect equivalents for Signor and Signora). We prefer Sora Mirella, near Tiber Island and on a corner of the Ponte Cestio in Trastevere, where the house special is a coconut grattachecca with real pieces of coconut sprinkling the top, and where the basic grattachecca costs about 3.50 euro (though the Superfrutta, with mixed syrups and seasonal fruit on top will run you a pricey 5.00 euro - but it’s worth every eurocent!).
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