In Ancient Greece, truth was personified as the goddess Aletheia. Her name stands in opposition to oblivion, A+Lethe, “A” as a negation of “Lethe”, the river of the underworld where the departed relinquish their earthly memories. Truth, in this sense, emerges as the counterforce to forgetting.
This idea forms the point of departure for Aleteia, Simone Mattar’s latest gastroperformance. Working in close collaboration with video artist Martina Mattar, Simone constructs an immersive, multisensory narrative guided by an experimental spirit. Through the orchestration of images, sounds, and flavors, she leads participants on an experience shaped by contingencies and improbable connections, in search of a truth that reveals itself gradually rather than being fixed.
Drawing inspiration from artists who have explored the intersections of travel, memory, and imagination, Simone revisits her own recollections, weaving together multiple references in a work that unfolds in five acts: Truth, Wind, Time, Echo, and Destiny.
Act 1
Truth The public enters the immersive space of the gastroperformance, where projected stars glow. Voices in different languages recount personal memories, until the voice of the narrator takes over, guiding the public through a narrative that moves across layers of space and time. For the First Act, we transform the table into the river Lethe, a current carrying the earthly memories of everyone who has lived. It flows out to earth from the underworld through the spring of unveiling, where remembrance assures the reign of the goddess of Truth. The narration weaves storytelling and reverie to make abstract concepts feel tangible. The guests sit down around the table-scultpure when the starter arrives. A figure molded after a sculpture of Aletheia is served as a goat-cheese panna cotta with honey and puxuri.
Act 2
Wind Act Two connects places on Earth that seem disconnected at first, but are in fact linked by an invisible force, the wind. The narrator tells us of the time the goddess of Truth followed the route of sand grains, taken by the wind from the Sahara desert through the Atlantic Guided by it, the goddess of Truth traces the movement of sand grains from the Sahara Desert across the Atlantic Ocean to the Amazon rainforest, where they nourish its exuberant green. Two gigantic terrestrial bodies, seemingly opposite and isolated, are linked by the narration not through geography, but through resonance. The first course employs a stencil technique using toasted cassava flour, evoking the grains of the Sahara. Beneath it lies an escondidinho/hachis parmentier made with pirarucu, the largest freshwater fish in the world, native to the Amazon basin.
Act 3
Time Act Three unsettles the linearity of time and its relation to space. Aleteia carries us to the Diomede Islands, where an invisible line is capable of unraveling truth. Challenging this notion of linearity, the islands’ time zones differ by fourteen hours, despite being only three kilometers apart. In winter, sea between yesterday and tomorrow freezes, forming a bridge. The narrator recalls a time when Aletheia attempted to cross it. The second course arrives in a transparent dish, where two mille-feuille scallops float in ajo blanco, topped with a tuile shaped like a wave.
Act 4
Echo In Act Four, Aletheia visits places around the world where different cultures found a way of preserving truth through collective memory, carried by rituals and traditions transmitted across generations. She leads us to a sanctuary that has been destroyed and rebuilt every twenty years for over fifteen hundred years. She also guides us through an ancient festival in which a talisman of good fortune is served as ritual food, shared with dragon gods. Finally, Aleteia takes us to a nation where truth is born from the soil, sown and cultivated through rituals that understand food as the bond between humans and gods. If the previous acts tended toward a more monochromatic palette, this one is an explosion of colors, sounds, and flavors. The third course is the talisman offered as ritual food in the dragon festival, as described by the narrator. In the gastroperformance, the talismans are tied to a dragon sculpture, then passed around the table so each diner can take on.
Act 5
Destiny In the final act, Destiny, Aletheia leads us back to the temple of Delphi, where oracular prophecies still echo. In this act, the audience is invited to orient themselves toward the unpredictable. The whole room is taken by a purple galaxy, recalling ancient cosmologies in which fate was written in the movement of stars. The cosmos is where destination and destiny begin to converge. The diners draw their fortune and trace the threads of their destiny, materialized in a dessert composed of hundreds of delicate spun-sugar strands infused with lavender.