Faena Art Center Buenos Aires
Aimeé Painé 1169
Faena Buenos Aires, Argentina
Faena Art is pleased to announce El Internacional. Archaeological Sandwich an immersive, participatory art installation and pop-restaurant bar conceived by artist Miralda and restauranteur Montse Guillén for the Faena Art Center Buenos Aires. Activated through July 27–29, the weekend-long pop-up will feature historic objects and new works by Miralda, in addition to a menu of international flavors and ingredients designed by chef Paul Qui (Top Chef 2011 and James Beard award-winning) in collaboration with chefs Marina Carluccio and Emiliano Yulita.
A site-specific installation for Faena Art Center Buenos Aires, El Internacional is a reimagination of El Internacional Tapas Bar & Restaurant, an artistic project and social experiment in the Tribeca neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City, conceived by Miralda and Montse Guillén. From 1984 to 1986, the restaurant served as a space for the daring exploration of cross-cultural, trans-disciplinary aesthetics, merging the cultural contexts of contemporary art and cuisine – an iconic symbol of 1980s New York during which nightlife and epicurean experience were placed in the same context as the visual and performing arts– and ultimately this fusion came to define that time and place. This movement in the 1980s presaged the current zeitgeist for immersive, participatory art installations—and Miralda and El Internacional were at the center of this vanguard moment wherein artists did not distinguish between disciplines but were more interested in creating platforms for social interaction and lived experience.
Miralda and Montse commented, “Traveling with El Internacional to Buenos Aires will be like a lobster dream that upon waking, one finds himself at the peak of rose- painted silo, full of memories.”
"Artistic exchange and cross-disciplinary cultural creation have always been fundamental to our vision. For this reason we invited Miralda and Montse Guillén to reimagine the Faena Art Center as El Internacional , an artistic and culinary experience that generates social interaction. By erasing the traditional borders between contemporary art and cuisine, creating new rituals, reinventing art through food and food through art, this project is exemplary of the spirit that inspires our multidisciplinary program. It is an honor to welcome these great artists to Buenos Aires and open the Art Center as a space for the creation of new communities.” Alan Faena
El Internacional will introduce artful dishes based upon flavors from Spain and the Spanish diaspora, present in both Argentina and the Philippines—where Qui is from—along with a conceptual focus on the way that ingredients have traveled from the old world to the new world, while indigenous and local influences have affected international cuisine. The original famous Blue Margarita from El Internacional will be served.
Paul Qui remarked: “It is a pleasure to collaborate with Miralda for the second time on a culinary and arts initiative but this time for the city of Buenos Aires. It is an honor to bring some of my particular flavors and palette to remix some of the culinary masterpieces this country is known for. What we are creating together is truly one-of-a-kind.”
The original El Internacional Tapas Bar & Restaurant fused food, sensorial experiences, performances and installation art as vehicles for transmitting and subverting traditions while encouraging new social practices. Miralda and Guillén described the project as a contemporary “Archaeological Sandwich” — an effort to reveal the many layers of our history and cultural context through the exploration of art, design and food. El Internacional engaged with the history of New York by excavating the multiple histories of that city while inspiring new forms for creating cultural community.
About Miralda
Throughout his artistic career, Antoni Miralda (Spain, 1942) has harnessed the power of food through rituals, ceremonials and processionals for over four decades. Invested in the ethnology and sociology of food as much as its taste and aesthetics, and engaged into an exploration of human behaviors more generally, Miralda’s gigantic gastronomic and other gatherings summon up visions of a world long thought to have been lost to more communal times. Among Miralda’s most notable and emblematic proposals is Food Culture Museum, a museum without walls that stages events and explores social practices through food. His work has been presented in Documenta, at the Venice and Istanbul biennials and has been the topic of numerous museum exhibitions, including the retrospectives Miralda, De gustibus non disputandum at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid (2010), and more recently Madeinusa at MACBA in Barcelona (2016). Miralda also served as a participating artist in Tide by Side, the artistic processional performance in December 2016 that celebrated the opening of the Faena District in Miami Beach.
About Montse Guillén
Montse Guillén was born in Melilla in 1946, in a family of restaurateurs. In 1980 she opened the MG, her own restaurant in Barcelona with a creative team including Carlos Riart, Mariscal, América Sanchez and Llorenç Torrado. She performed a one day event presenting tapas at the Windows of the World restaurant at the World Trade Center in New York in 1981. Together with Miralda, she opened El Internacional Tapas Bar & Restaurant, in Tribeca in September 1984, instantly becoming a celebration of food and art, which the New York Times awarded with two stars, and with the New York Times magazine characterized Ms. Guillén as "The Tapa-Dance Kid." Together with Miralda she created FoodCultura. The concept of FoodCultura was developed in the context of the Food Pavilion, Expo2000 in Hannover where Montse Guillén introduces grasshoppers as tapas. From 2007 FoodCultura is relocated to Barcelona, functioning as an archive and meeting space at the neighborhood of Poblenou.
About Paul Qui
Paul Qui rocketed the ranks to culinary stardom after winning “Top Chef,” followed up by a James Beard Foundation Award for Best Chef: Southwest. One of the most formidable young talents in North America with critically-acclaimed restaurants, including Pao by Paul Qui in Faena Hotel Miami Beach and a group of Asian-inspired food trucks in Austin, Texas, Qui takes a modernist approach towards food that is playful, authentic and unexpected. Born in Manila, Philippines and trained in classic French and Japanese cuisine, Qui is a master at marrying classical technique with local flavors, while also taking inspiration from Filipino, Japanese, Spanish and French culinary styles.