La Ribot – Online Catalogue

Spanish dancer-choreographer and live artist La Ribot’s new website was launched last year- follow this link.

It features a comprehensive online catalogue of the artist’s work from the 1980s to the present, with texts by Rachel Withers.

Included is the following easy-to-follow recipe:

Another Pa amb tomàquet, 2002

To make Pa amb tomàquet La Ribot style, you’ll need:

*several very ripe tomatoes

*a bulb of garlic

*a litre of olive oil

*a chopping board and a large kitchen knife

*underwear (for wearing, then for mopping up oil and tomato)

*a hand-held video camera with charged battery

*a music CD by the Spanish artist, pianist and musician composer Carles Santos, plus CD player

*a remote control for selecting music tracks

*a cardboard box

Holding the camera in your right hand and the knife in your left, stab repeatedly at the garlic and tomatoes till they are halved. Remove clothing and rub limbs with garlic, paying close attention to feet, belly, thighs, face and neck. Squash over the tomatoes and slather yourself with olive oil. (Be generous – this is Catalan peasant cooking not cuisine minceur!) Video the preparation process and knife action “with a total lack of modesty”, introducing increasingly agitated camera movements. If done correctly, the halved tomatoes will start to hint at the celebrated plughole shots in the shower scene from Psycho. When finished, wipe down surfaces with underwear and dump the disgustingly oily debris into the cardboard box. Throughout, use the CD remote to select suitably Hitchcockian snatches of music.

Another Pa amb tomàquet, 2002, uses footage filmed during the production of Distinguished Piece No. 34, Pa amb tomàquet, 2000. La Ribot tested the recipe five times over five days: the first four days’ footage forms the hors d’oeuvre to the gallery performance Still Distinguished, while the mouth-watering fifth version was served to visitors at the Galeria Soledad Lorenzo, Madrid, as an editioned 12-minute video. The piece forms an affectionate and irreverent reworking of the shower scene from Psycho, but with a feminist twist. Thanks to the hand-held camera, Hitchcock is dethroned; here, Janet Leigh directs the shoot, and makes the cuts.