Abstract :
[en] GospodinA is a performance protocol and practice-based research project in which alimentary gestures inherited from 1980s socialist Romania become the material of a documentary animation practice. Drawing on recorded transmissions between the presenter and his mother-a living archive of survival cooking under Ceausescu-this paper proposes palatal cinema: a mode in which the mouth, hand, and digestive body function as projection spaces for state ideology and collective memory. The paper develops the concept of alimentary animation as a theoretical framework that reads food not as a static cultural object but as a time-based, transformative, and relational medium-engaging Suzanne Buchan's pervasive animation, Paul Wells's metamorphosis, Esther Leslie's reading of Benjamin's mimetic faculty, Thomas Lamarre's animetic interval, Diana Taylor's archive/repertoire distinction, and Richard Schechner's restored behavior. It also responds to Alexander Schellow's challenge to extend the theoretical framework beyond the Western-canonical tradition, engaging Amadou Hampâté Bâ on embodied knowledge transmission, Vandana Shiva on ecofeminism and survival practice, and María Lugones on decolonial epistemology. The presenter argues that alimentary gestures resist fixity in the same way animation resists indexicality: both operate through transformation, approximation, and the trace of absent originals. The paper analyzes the Lick and Listen performance protocol-in which participants receive a box containing a handmade powdered-milk chocolate embedded with gold wood screws, a square of commercial chocolate, and a QR code linking to an audio narration-as a concentrated instance of alimentary animation in which prohibition, desire, memory, and the trace of state-managed scarcity are simultaneously activated in the participant's body. The five-course meal structure of GospodinA is analyzed as a durational composition, the caraway soup theorized as the alimentary gesture of leaving someone with safety.
