The Menu — Group Show at LAS Gallery, London, 3 June 2025
 

In The Menu, Riccardo Rizzetto presented Sounding Crops (photograph) and Not All Sound is Heard (poem): two interconnected gestures that explore food as territory, sound, and system — as something cultivated, narrated, and continuously transformed.

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The photograph depicts a field of Purple Artichokes on Sant’Erasmo, a small island in the Venetian Lagoon. Yet the image is only an entry point: a portal into a layered terrain where food is not merely an ingredient, but a living palimpsest.

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From the hands that tend the soil to the tidal rhythms that sustain it, from the vernacular infrastructures of care to the large-scale interventions that violently reshape them, the artichoke becomes a witness — a quiet interlocutor between human and more-than-human ecologies. It embodies the frictions between tradition and modernity, visibility and erasure, cultivation and extraction.

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The accompanying poem, Not All Sound is Heard, extends this reflection through listening: questioning what it means to sound, and what sounding could become when attuned to the inaudible — to the murmurs of soil, water, and labour.

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Rather than staging an edible experience, Rizzetto’s contribution imagines a speculative digestion; a menu of voices, gestures, and stories that reclaim the field as a communal table: messy, marginal, and politically fertile.

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The work forms part of the research conducted at the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London, where he investigated the Purple Artichoke of Sant’Erasmo as a lens through which to examine authenticity, agroecological resilience, and infrastructural imposition in the Venetian Lagoon.

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Curated by Emilia González Salgado and Giuseppe Burdo

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