Studio DEMO x Serpentine: Coagulating Sunlight

How and what do we metabolise? Serpentine Arts Technologies convenes three socially engaged practitioners whose work with food, gastronomy, and performance reimagines recipes as models for civic intervention, exploring labour, migration, ritual, and systems of social conditioning through acts of cooking and consumption.

Artist, theorist, and culinary practitioner Adriana Gallo explores the coagulation of labour and value through the preparation of fresh curd. Drawing from Marx’s language of crystallisation and Seamus Heaney’s phrase “we are all coagulated sunlight,” the session traces transformations from grass to milk to commodity. Working across cooking, conversation, and shared consumption, Gallo examines how systems of extraction and nourishment become embodied through everyday materials and gestures. The preparation and serving of curd becomes both demonstration and metaphor: a meditation on labour solidifying into form, value, and exchange.

Studio DEMO is a live broadcast hub at the New Museum, open to drop into throughout the day and available via livestream. Featuring NEW INC's wider creative community, broadcasts take the form of talks, demonstrations, couch conversations, panel discussions, DJ sets, and more. This year, NEW INC partners with peer organizations to build thematic programming for Studio DEMO. Partners include Geidai Project, Onassis Foundation, Rhizome, Serpentine, YoungArts.