Flux Gourmet

Peter Strickland’s fifth feature takes place in an art residency led by an upper-class aesthete who has invited a culinary collective to perform their “sonic catering” practice for a month. Hired to report on their creative process, a Greek writer begins to suffer from indigestion, to which the institution’s sarcastic doctor responds by advising him to “let food be his medicine”. While his intestinal disorders force him to acknowledge his own malaise, the collective is undermined by internal quarrels as well as external assaults from a group of sardonic, rejected candidates. With its inimitable, precise and colourful gestures, Strickland’s gory comedy reconnects the image with those organic processes that art usually deems to be impure and unacceptable. Not as a provocation, but to remind us that the imagination should not be seen as separate from the natural realm. As the writer puts it at the outset: “Every day at the Sonic Catering Institute begins with a walk in the park”.