Quori Theodor and Bobbi Salvör Menuez host “Synanthropy” dinner for a closing of the “Passion for the Void” exhibition by Olivia Drusin and Kay Kasparhauser, at Spill 180 in New York

What does it mean to occupy voids or liminal spaces, sites of both excess and lack? At Passion for the Void, a two-person exhibition for Olivia Drusin and Kay Kasparhauser at Red Hook, Brooklyn based gallery Spill 180, the question of residing between everything and nothingness becomes a generative archive for thinking through the tyranny of established spatial imaginaries and taxonomical categorization. Drusin’s slick, clinical paintings that zoom into details of revolving doors and elevator floor, revealing how intermediary spaces, when devoid of human trace, become uncannily seductive. Kasparhauser’s materially complex assemblages, which also cite the tradition of abstract landscape painting with their layered, intersecting linings and zones, poetically evoke multiple imaginaries: insects and their sexuality, guts, digestive dysfunction, and herbal healing. Together, these works complicate boundaries between interiority and exteriority, challenging hegemonic thinking that frustrates more-than-human kinship.

Passion for the Void’s closing celebration Synanthropy on Oct 17th, hosted by quori theodor and Bobbi Salvör Menuez (together with Precious Okoyomon, they form the collective Spiral Theory Test Kitchen, committed to exploring cooking and enjoying food as a liberatory method toward ecological care and alternative sexuality), was an intimately performative dinner for 40 guests. The dinner continues Menuez and theodor’s interest in exploring food as a psychosexually and politically charged material, within the context of Drusin’s and Kasparhauser’s material and conceptual interests: decay, the grotesque, and the borders among body, fantasy, and non-human others. Can food be an abject material that in divesting our libidinal overcharge still uphold the poetics of nourishment and communal togetherness?

The seated dinner started with Permeation Axis, in which guests, like a conveyor system, passed plates for theodor and Menuez to apply their rice paper painting along with ants. The guests then rotated the plates along the same axis to distribute the dishes among themselves, forming relationships with their seat neighbors along the way. As the guests added elements from other dishes—all inspired by Passion for the Void and accommodating to Kasparhauser’s digestive issues—such as Mandibles (cucumber angles), Necropolis (kogashi imo with whipped butter), and pampered daddy (smoked eggplant), each guest’s Permeation Axis plate became a base on which creative synergy becomes alive.

The night ended with deserts. Odaxelagnia (hojicha panna cotta in field tubes), which takes its name from the feeling of being aroused by being bitten or biting, has the same texture and look to a brand of infant cat treats called Churu. And guests were expected to suck out of the tubes, implicitly succumbing to theodor and Menuez’s power. Indeed, the dinner was also an exercise in toying with rules, conventions, power dynamics around food. As the hosts painted plates, standing under an overhead projector, the guests anxiously and obediently awaited the results, without agency on what is being fed. Yet, as the guests later mixed and matched different dishes on the menu, new unexpected sensory experiences kicked in. Such is the beautiful ambiguity of social practice, which sensitively attends to the dialogical exchange taking place when we treat social material as artistic material.

Photos by Bobbi Salvör Menuez and Kunning Hung