Emmanuel Giraud's Trimalchio Feast at Villa Medici

On September 5, 2009, at 11 PM, Emmanuel Giraud staged a reinterpretation of Trimalchio's feast from Petronius's Satyricon in the gardens of the Villa Medici in Rome. The event, part of Giraud's residency in "Culinary Arts," invited eleven guests to a participatory dining performance that questioned perception and reality. A slave dressed in orange, reminiscent of Guantanamo detainees and renamed "stagiaire," guided witnesses through a mysterious path. The menu included a "prank pig" that appeared not to be gutted, angering Trimalchio, but actually contained lobster meat inside a clay form. Giraud, influenced by Ferran Adrià, created unrecognizable dishes that exist only through memory. The performance was the second part of a diptych begun in March 2009 at Montpellier's Galerie des Beaux-Arts with "Devenir gris," a memory of a funeral meal by Grimod de la Reynière. Collaborators included Pascal Gautrand (costumes), Yann Robin (music), Béatrice Cussol (painting), and Caroline Duchatelet (video). New director Éric de Chassey will present the video documentation in 2010, which Giraud considers his true artwork.