A Banquet of Teeth
Martina Velluti’s Compendium of Culinary Splendours is a collision of flesh, ink, hunger and hysteria, and a notable number of vaginas...
Martina Velluti tears open the doors to the overlit abyss of her Kensington townhouse, trailing bergamot and the acrid ghost of something burnt long ago. The air congeals. ‘An ambush of artworks,’ she calls it, but it is more than that. They press in - twisted into Perspex, ossified in wax, teased from metal, entombed in cement. They leer, gnash their teeth, breathe. It is not the kind of collection which hangs serenely, but hungers.
A fox brooch yelps from the collar of her Dries van Noten blouse, its mouth locked in a scream it never finished. In her hands - sanitised the instant after she shook mine - she cradles a freshly minted hardback, the thing she has spent three years forcing into existence. I move, just slightly - fingers hovering near the edge of the cover - and she flinches in revulsion; she does not intend to give her Compendium of Culinary Splendours to me. The book is hers to bestow, not distribute. So it remains in her grasp, soothed by lacquered fingertips, treated like an extension of herself. ‘Warm,’ she announces, in a tone suggesting she is imparting truth not opinion. ‘It will only grow warmer. Books inhale the world around them. The dribbled espresso. The anchovy oil. The residue of careless kitchens.’ Her lips recoil at ‘careless’ as though the word itself is unsanitary.
Beyond the cover - polished to a pepperoni sheen - are the autographs of 49 female artists she conscripted, given no real brief but to inhabit the pages with their culinary confessions. They have done so with zeal, though not necessarily coherence. ‘Recipes? Pah! They belong to everyone,’ she declares. ‘Aubergine parmigiana. Artichoke pie. Gelato economico. These things exist already.’ Instead, the pages pulse with cryptic etchings and frenzied smears, scrawled directives, and blurred type. The voice of a stray chef here, a complacent magazine editor there, all dissolving into the din.
She speaks of legacy as though it were a room she has already walked through, an afterimage of herself reflected in its mirrored surfaces. Her grandmother’s hands, perpetually gloved in flour. Her mother’s voice, a staccato from the kitchens of Varese. Her mother-in-law, forever stuffing animals into intestines, intestines into jars, and jars into dark cellars. Preserving. Consuming. An unbroken cycle. As a child, Velluti made mayonnaise - stirring yolks, sluicing oil, drop-by-drop. And, sometimes, it curdled. ‘It is the simplest things,’ she intones, ‘which resist perfection.’
Now she presides over her own home feasts for 120 artists, designers, curators, six times a year. They sit beneath the unfriendly glare of modern masterpieces and dismantle eight-course symphonies of expensive indigestion ‘family style’. These ‘gatherings’, she tells me, were the spark for the book. ‘Contemporary art is about contemporary life. And contemporary life is about consumption. Fast, greedily, and without reflection.’
Of course, Velluti does not cook. That task is left to a man so paralysed by expectation that he dissolved himself into cocaine, until he could taste colours and move through walls. So enlightened was he, so transported, that he absently set chopsticks for the consommé at Velluti’s fundraiser in honour of Marina Abramovic. The Soave-stuffed guests stiffened as the bowls were placed before them, glancing towards her for instruction - was this a culinary rendition of The Artist is Present? They exhaled only when she lifted her bowl with both hands and sipped. One by one, they followed, murmuring of ritual and intention, before discreetly enquiring after the caterer’s card.
Velluti releases a laugh. Seemingly premeditated at first, then splitting apart into something indecipherable. A rusted hinge, creaking open, breaking into a sound with no natural origin. Her breath shortens, though she seems uninterested in reclaiming it. It ruptures further - expelled from the chest cavity of something ancient and displeased. Then it chokes, stutters, slickens - richly wet with saliva.
She claps a manicured hand over her mouth, her eyes glassy with mirth. ‘A sickness,’ she confesses, voice conspiratorial, ‘which consumes me whole. A disease.’ It took hold in the late 90s, when she was studying Art Gallery Administration in New York. That is where she learned the ‘mechanism of the machine’ - the vested interests, the gloss of intellectual merit, the sheer bloody stamina required to bend taste to one’s will. ‘The market was afraid of women,’ she states, each word a hammerfall, then allows silence to lap hungrily at the edges of the conversation for an entire three minutes. ‘Afraid they would go off, have babies, and forget how to paint. But artists aren’t accountants. Their talent doesn’t get put on maternity leave.’ The book is a rebuttal, thick with feminine hunger, and, as a simple matter of observation, an unignorable number of vaginas, lining its pages like a biological manifesto.
Today, the market scrambles to adjust. Galleries, auction houses, the seedy middlemen of curation - all shuffling to compensate for their historic failings, jamming their walls with urgently acquired female genius. ‘The value of a woman’s work-up, down, up, down,’ she gestures, tracing the rise and fall of a speculative graph, where someone, somewhere, always wins.
She never buys from artists she hasn’t met. ‘Artists,’ she exhales, as if exasperated by my ignorance, ‘forge, destroy, devour. They cannot be led.’ They forge, destroy, devour, and reinvent. And leave the wreckage behind.
The profits from Martina Velluti’s Compendium of Culinary Splendours will be siphoned into Cognisant Futures, a foundation for neurodivergent education, as nebulous in purpose as it is well-heeled in patronage. A major beneficiary is her own daughter, Araminta-Felicity, who has seen ‘extraordinary results’ from its guidance, largely because treatment released her, if only momentarily, from this painted pandemonium. ‘You begin to see how their minds work,’ Velluti intones in the cadence of someone narrating a documentary. ‘So different. But they can learn as much as anyone else. They can and must be taught.’
Now bored, she glances past me towards the courtyard, where an industrial apparatus methodically consumes a grand piano. The wood splinters pitifully; the ivory keys shriek. She notices me noticing it and groans as though humouring an old joke. Then gurgles, chokes, the laughter resurfacing - a relentless, glottal spasm, a graphic equaliser of a crime scene dialled to the max. It ricochets off the cold walls, foul and unrepentant.
My throat tightens. I swallow against the sensation of something misplaced. The laugh continues, a marathon of disgust, escalating to something between ritual and exorcism. I double over. The acid comes fast, brutal, tearing its way up, surging past my teeth in a spray of heat and shame. The floor receives it with a sick slap. My body lurches again, wringing itself out. She throws her head back, lips slick with laughter, and roars into the void - ‘Ancora!’
The gnashing metal bites clean through the last of the piano, its carcass reduced to silence. Somewhere in the distance, a car alarm wails, then obediently falls silent too. It is all being recorded. Someone will still make music out of the pieces, though whether it will be melodious or monetisable is no longer in her hands.
I check my watch.
The second hand drags time along. The person filming lowers their camera, flicks splinters off their coat, then glances at Velluti, and delivers a crisp thumbs-up. ‘Back Tuesday,’ he says, zipping his bag. ‘For the DB5.’
