Paysage Jurassique (Jurassic Landscape) by Lei Saito at the Maison de La Vache qui rit, 31 May and 1 June 2024

In 2023, Lab’Bel initiated Lab’Food, a new series of events combining artistic and culinary creation, and an opportunity to showcase reflections on the food of today and tomorrow, a subject in which the Bel Group has been interested for several years, through the specific language of contemporary creators.

For this new project, Lab’Bel asked Japanese artist Lei Saito to create an edible landscape, Paysage Jurassique for the Maison de La Vache qui rit in Lons Le Saunier. Designed to be an enjoyable, sensory experience, open to a broad public, the event follows in the footsteps of Paysage Fromagesque (Cheesy Landscape), a performance inspired by the history of the Bel Group and the formal beauty of cheese, performed internally in 2023 for Bel Group employees.

These two unusual landscapes with evocative names are part of a series of performances and culinary installations, by the name of Cuisine Existentielle (Existential Cuisine) that Lei Saito has been developing for several years. This process, at once plastic and narrative, places the artist at the heart of a rhizomic dynamic where encounter and movement instil a particular energy into a constantly renewed aesthetic experience. For each “chapter” of her Cuisine Existentielle, she develops tales that are inspired both by stories dear to her guests and the spirit of the places she invests in order to create bespoke edible works. A series of ephemeral moments where taste, vision, and poetry come together.

For Paysage Jurassique the idea is to go back to the distant geological era, made famous by Hollywood dinosaurs and to reactivate the tectonic magic that shaped the region two hundred million years ago.

Using exclusively local products sourced from producers engaged in sustainable agriculture and breeding, the visual artist succeeds in bringing out the imaginary layers of this geological mille-feuille that is the Jura today.

With the fantasy characteristic of her work, Lei Saito invites us to think about the landscape in its infra-zones, “below” the typical representations that often link products to a symbolic and immutable territory. The aim here is to taste, by metaphor, the less visible layers of the earth on which we live.

Interview with Lei Saito by Léo de Boisgisson, Lab’Food Curator.

 

• What is your history or relationship with food? How long have you been experimenting with it as a medium? Was there a trigger, or rather a food that started it all?

I come from a family of gourmets and food lovers. For us, food has an important place, as with many Japanese people. There is a respect for what we eat ourselves and what we cook for others, both for celebrations and for everyday cooking. From an early age, I was already aware of the aesthetic dimension of food, the dishes we made at home and those I saw in recipe books that were always beautifully bound and nicely illustrated.

Birthdays were always the subject of original creations. It was on these occasions that I started making cakes which I photographed using my father’s film camera. I was already documenting my creations (laughs). When I was very small, I made my own notebook where I drew the story of a little rabbit having a picnic. This was my first artist’s book. When I think about it, I have never really stopped preparing meals and staging happy moments.

• Can you tell us about your arts background? 

My journey as an artist in France is a combination of somewhat hazardous, even tragicomic, circumstances. I arrived in 2003, I wanted to become a curator, but there was no department dedicated to curatorship strictly speaking. I ended up studying art history at Nanterre, but it wasn’t really for me. At the time, I was sharing a flat with architects. Every day, I would leave the apartment saying I was going to college. I would travel there by RER but often, as soon as I arrived on the Nanterre Université platform, I would turn around and head back into town! The university made me nervous, with its closed windows and its smell of old cigarettes! Instead, I would spend my days going to museums and galleries to see exhibitions. One day, I walked to the Beaux-Arts (Paris School of Fine Arts) where I discovered the mulberry tree courtyard, and I knew that I had found the place that corresponded to my idea of ​​art and beauty. I began preparing for the entrance exam and made my flamingo soup for the occasion. It was very hot the day of the exam, I didn’t speak French very well, so rather than attempt a long speech, I did something refreshing for the jury. I was accepted and joined Annette Messager’s studio.

 

• Can you tell us where the name “existential cuisine” comes from and what it means? 

I can’t really remember where it comes from, it probably dates back a long time ago, to my family heritage and my taste for the linguistic aspect of art—the titles are an integral part of my compositions—but it more than likely stems from an acute awareness of the inevitable fleetingness of life’s good moments. Existential cuisine allows you to capture the beauty of things, for a brief moment. I started making cooking a regular practice when I was in residence in Amsterdam at the Rijksakademie in 2010-2011 and at the Cité des Arts in Montmartre in 2014-2015. At the time, I was very busy, and I was frustrated at not being able to fully enjoy the company of the other residents. So, to make up for it, I regularly organized dinners with themes and original compositions, and poured all my money into this. But it was wonderful. One thing led to another, the artists who were guests became friends, and as soon as they had an exhibition, they called on me for the openings. Not as a caterer, of course, but as one of their peers. On each occasion, I created a specific performance, designed as a special moment. This is how I created the decapitated nuns and sadistic dessert at the Palais de Tokyo, for example. In fact, “existential cuisine” developed through the contact with the artists I met and the exchanges that arose from our conversations around art and beauty. Today, “existential cuisine” is aimed at a wider audience. Mostly artistic institutions. It pleases me to know that sometimes my productions are presented to people who are not necessarily familiar with contemporary art, or even who are resistant to it. Although I do not campaign for a democratization of art at all costs, I do believe in the virtues of sharing.

 

What inspires these culinary reactions? With which of the five senses do you work the most? Or rather, in what order do you make use of them? Sight, taste, etc…

I am an epicure in the philosophical sense of the word. For me, beauty and deliciousness complement each other. What’s beautiful should be delicious and at the same time, have a conceptual basis.

I don’t consider myself to be more visual than olfactory. You could say that I try to bring all the senses together in my compositions around an intellectual framework, where language has an important role.

I have ever considered myself a cook. Likewise, my performances are not aesthetic events but a way of enjoying time. I am an artist who does her work as an artist, which for me, consists of creating analogies, playing with synaesthesia to connect a taste to a word, an image to a place, a vegetable to a story, for example. A variety of elements can provide the beginning of the story around which I compose my performance, a recipe, anecdote, season, ingredient, or a play on words. I then “let my ideas rise”, a bit like whipped cream rising in a spiral, and from there, I improvise. I actually love improvising. Every time, it is different and delicious and this is how “existential cuisine” can be inscribed in Time.