Eternal digestion  
by Luca Francesconi 

Written for Eternal Digestion, curated by Ana Iwataki and Marion Vasseur Raluy. 67 Steps, Los Angeles, 2018. 

Decomposition is an inevitable event to which all living or vegetative entities are subjected. It is carried out through the intervention of microbes and bacteria which trigger a fermentation process. 
Fermentation is a passage of state (or cooking), converts some substances into other substances, and in the meantime releases carbon dioxide. Even living beings, corrupting their integrity, are decomposed in this way, fermenting they disappear. 
This passage, the last of our life, is fully included in the food chain. Today it is very altered, but it is always good to remember that at the extremes of this chain, still exists a living being, on the one hand, and a piece of land, on the other. 
Sake and wine are fermented. 
Even our stomach, every time we eat, reproduces and accelerates this process. Some things animate first, become inanimate, decomposing and becoming other forms of energy, reintroducing itself in the food chain. 
This long canvas of passages is summarized in a path that reduces something alive and great, into something alive and tiny, invisible. Our digestive system does all this. 
Cancels and does disappear, transforms and disperses. 
Reintroduces and continues. 
By opening the stomach to a person, or to any living thing that can be done, we would find medium forms, ideas of hybrid form between what was a vegetable or an animal, and what it will become. At last, our intestine is a Platonic cave, in which lie “ideas of an idea”, or “ideas of form”. 
Realities designed to become other realities. 
Recently I started to get interested in Rupert Sheldrake’s theories, and in particular the Morphic Resonance. The group soul and the collective conscience shared with other men, I found it very similar to the idea of popular art and popular tradition. 
However, as regards the acceleration of “deformation of the forms” that occurs in our intestine, very similar to the fermentation process of putrefaction, vomit is the cognitive tool of ourselves closer to the future. 
Vomiting is an act that falsifies the food chain, altering for a short time that disappearance into nothingness, and a new beginning, of which we ourselves are agents: like any other living being. 
The alcohol of wine and sake, or fermented and decomposed vegetables, favors in our gut this process of intellectual and material consciousness, leading - at high doses - to vomit. 
Finally, this process of “inside and outside” the living beings called alimentation is once again a lexicon of concave and convex, of affinities and divergences, not unlike the sexual act, in which two living beings enter one inside the other, causing, for various reasons, leakage of body fluids. 
There is no narrative in all this, I’m not interested in it. I believe that sex itself is, in a oniric way, a predatory act: therefore a food act.