Nutrients
by Margaux Schwab & Céline Mathieu
The principle of automatic writing is rather simple: you put the pen down and focus on writing without break for a set period of time. The method interestingly moves the writing body beyond consciousness; what it thinks it knows, goes off on a tangent.
Margaux Schwab, founder of foodculture days, and artist and writer Céline Mathieu spend a week in Topolò, thinking of the flow of ingredients. They will share a daily writing practice during their stay, considering both food and words as nourishment. What do we take in, and what does it result in? In conversation and through writing, we reconsider what our cyclic replenishing in food as in words could mean, considering notions of perishability, restoration and mutuality.
Reflecting on metabolizing goods and ideas, they gather daily. For three consecutive days, at sunrise and sundown they invite others to join their cycle of ingesting and writing. The writing sessions span 27-minutes of automatic writing, informed by consumed local nutrients that influence the body like the dream herb Artemisia that stimulates one’s lucid dreams; nettle soup affecting the blood; yeast on the fruits in the hills–... The ingestion as well as its memory of digestion become a simple writing prompt that marks time, nutrients, and metabolic confluence. What’s prepared is stored as a topological recipe, and even if not described directly; what is ingested might find its automatic way onto the page.
