Culinary Performance

Jean-François Boclé is an artist from Martinique based in Paris. Visitors to the first exhibition held in what is now Cloud Seven in 2016 may remember the sea of blue plastic bags that filled the top floor. He first developed a culinary performance practice in 2001 in Burkina Faso with Le mouton et le Colombo. In 2016, invited to take part in the Colombo Art Biennale in Sri Lanka, he proposed to “cook a Colombo in Colombo.” At the Cloud Bar, he will prepare a vegetarian version of this traditional Caribbean dish and invite the audience to taste it as a performative gesture. Prior to the tasting, he will address the coloniality of taste and the system of indentured labor that followed the abolition of slavery in British and French colonies. This history resonates personally with Boclé, whose own family has roots in indentured labor — a long-standing taboo.