Efthimios Moschopoulos: FÁE | an ephemeral dining

“FÁE | an ephemeral dining” draws inspiration from culinary art, agricultural labor, the Japanese floral arrangement method of ikebana, and the study of preparing and setting up a dining experience (tablescaping), bringing all these elements into dialogue. Flavors, aromas, and sensations bring to the table the memories of a child growing up on a Greek island.

The project explores dining as a social practice—both a finite and ever-changing landscape. A form that captures the transient nature of human experience.

Childhood memories of collecting salt from the rocks on the island where I grew up, harvesting olives, making tomato paste, planting vegetables, and braiding onions serve as a platform for exploring notions such as place, gathering, belonging, transience, community, and companionship.

An invitation to a sensory journey. The body as an archive of memory, experience, and sensation. A dining sculpture created in situ from start to finish.

Set Design: Theo Triantafyllidis

Music: Yakovlev

I have a vivid memory of my mother sitting on a crate outside our house, surrounded by many more crates of a lot (really a lot!) of tomatoes. My sisters and I were beside her, peeling and cutting tomatoes to prepare them for paste. I remember the overwhelming scent of tomatoes because there were so many, an aroma so strong that it made me nauseous. Throughout August, trays of tomato juice would be spread across tables, waiting under the scorching sun to be turned into paste. I remember gathering salt as an event. My mother, aunts, cousins, and siblings would take cloth bags and collect salt from the rocks by the sea near our house. My mother called the rocks “double-edged swords” because they could easily cut you if you weren’t careful. I would run from rock to rock, and I often got cut. The salty water would drip from the bag onto my cuts, and there was a level of satisfaction in the sting. Our whole family would go to harvest olives, and what I remember most of all is taking breaks to eat bread with olive oil, tomato, and feta cheese and then, when we were done with the meal, my mother would almost always peel an apple and give out slices to us off the tip of her knife. As a teenager, I remember riding my bike every afternoon to water and feed the animals. I never saw it as a chore, though; their companionship gave me joy, and I was attached to them. It was always difficult for me to understand how they ended up on our table after we gave them so much care and love.

When I started thinking about the idea for “FÁE,” I imagined a table. A table that would be a meeting place, a medium to share my memories, thoughts, and references about food, but also about the object itself. A bucolic confessional distilling both the tenderness and violence of the countryside, its solitude and the anxiety of identity, the need for expression, and the formation of sexuality. I imagined ‘offering’ a dinner, a space to share stories like these and create new ones.