Dessert for Genocidaires Recipe
INGREDIENTS
• 1 tripod • 1 cellphone • 2 stools • 1 wireless razor • 30 g of slip (liquid clay) • 1 watermelon • 1 knife • 1 bandage • 1 kilo of flour • 1 liter of milk • 6 eggs • 100 ml of gasoline in a small PET bottle with a hole in the cap • 1 lighter • 1 cake with whipped cream • 1 candle • 1 party blower
- You cannot make this dish alone; you need help for one of the steps and to document the process.
METHOD OF PREPARATION
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Turn on your cellphone camera and start recording video.
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Shave part of your hair and put the razor in a safe place.
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Put the slip on your cheeks like an American football player. Throw the container away.
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Take the watermelon with one arm and start hitting it until you make a hole.
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Take the knife and cut it in half.
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From one half, remove the inside and throw it on the floor.
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Place the other half on your head.
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Secure the helmet with the bandage.
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Take the kilo of flour and throw it hard on the floor. Stomp on it with hatred.
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Take the liter of milk, open it, and hold it at pelvis height as if it were your penis, pretending to urinate on the flour with more hatred, then pour the milk over your head and face. You may drink a sip to refresh yourself after this hard work. Throw the container on the ground.
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Offer 6 eggs to your companion(s), stand against the wall, and signal them to throw the eggs at you.
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Take the candle in your left hand, the gasoline in your right, and draw a circle around yourself. 1. Leave the gasoline container in a safe place. Light the gasoline circle on fire.
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Light the candle with the fire and hold it facing the camera as a living image.
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Place the lit candle on the cake.
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Take the party blower in your left hand.
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Take the cake in your right hand, hold it, make a wish, and strike another image… by stamping it onto your face.
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Blow the party blower.
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Upload the content to the Internet so it becomes real.
It begins with a body offered to disorder as if it were an altar. The everyday is dismantled, the festive becomes a rite: what should nourish, console, or entertain is transformed into matter of waste, into a masquerade of the useless, into a violent offering. The body is covered with improvised scars, marks of clay, milk, and dust that no longer protect or adorn, but expose the absurdity of every sacrifice.
The gesture oscillates between carnival and torment. What could be child’s play becomes a bitter ceremony: celebration twists itself until it brushes against cruelty, laughter breaks into a scream that never manages to escape. The covered face becomes a fruit-cranium, helmet and wound at once. That face stares at the camera with a mixture of irony and exhaustion, like someone who knows that life is measured in numbers and headlines, in weight and in price, while what is essential spills away without remedy.
The circle burns—not as a promise of purification, but as a border separating what remains inside—body, residue, shadow—from what outside insists on staying untouched. There the artist stands firm, rooted in the middle of the catastrophe he himself has invoked, as if to say: “this is the measure of our abundance and our violence, of our laughter and our loss.”
The ritual completes itself when the celebration smashes against the face and ceases to be celebration, turning instead into a grotesque mask. The comic and the tragic fuse into the same instant: an impossible birthday in which what is celebrated is the fragility of being alive.
The result is neither banquet nor feast, but a scene of liminal ruin, an uncomfortable mirror. What should have been sweet becomes bitter, what should have given pleasure becomes wound, and what should have united us in community turns into a spectacle of solitude.
Amid the chaos, the question persists: how much does life weigh when reduced to an image? How much is destroyed so that someone, on the other side of the screen, might laugh or shudder?
- Egon MonsivAIs
Video captures by Tessa Fansa and Rafaella Dulanto