We are taught to keep our hands off art. To stand at an appropriate distance, admire the composition, perhaps lean in for a closer look, but never close enough to leave a mark. The artwork remains intact, and so, conveniently, do we. Yet some of the most intimate experiences we have of the world begin precisely where that distance disappears. A fragrance enters our breath. A flavour settles on the tongue and changes as we swallow. Long before we have found the words to describe either, our bodies have already responded.

The suspicion surrounding these experiences has a history. Throughout influential traditions of Western thought, vision was entrusted with reason and intellectual authority, while smell and taste were relegated to the less respectable territories of animal instinct. These distinctions were hardly innocent. The rational eye was culturally masculine; the unruly, sensuous body was feminine. To describe certain senses as irrational or excessive was also to diminish the forms of knowledge associated with those who had been assigned those same qualities.

There is something ironic about a civilisation so determined to distance itself from its own animality that it developed an entire hierarchy of ways to experience the world. We have become remarkably accomplished spectators of our own lives. In an age of constant digital stimulation, images accumulate faster than our capacity to attend to them. Experiences are increasingly encountered through representations that can be paused or replaced with a movement of the thumb. Looking offers the possibility of maintaining a distance between ourselves and what we encounter, even when the subject is profoundly intimate.

Smell and taste complicate that distance. They involve a passage between the world and the body, an exchange that is neither entirely voluntary nor entirely predictable. A scent can alter the emotional atmosphere of a room without changing anything we see. A flavour may produce pleasure or revulsion before we have decided what to make of it. The body responds according to its own histories, sometimes contradicting the meanings we consciously attach to an experience.

My interest in working with scent and food is closely connected to the questions of gender and sexuality that inform my artistic practice. Our relationships with our bodies are shaped not only by how we experience them, but also by the expectations imposed upon them and the meanings others assign to their appearance. Scent and taste offer a way of exploring these tensions through the body itself, allowing embodied experience to become a means of artistic expression rather than merely its subject.

This is the proposition behind Aftertaste, where dinner becomes a form of theatre. The meal is not an accompaniment to the performance but part of its dramaturgy. Bitterness can outlast a spoken sentence. The warmth of a dish may introduce an intimacy that the narrative has not yet disclosed. These sensations cannot be entirely directed: the same mouthful may call forth tenderness in one person and discomfort in another. What the audience experiences is inseparable from the particular bodies through which the work unfolds.

As our experiences become more mediated by technology, the distinction between representing an experience and living through it feels increasingly significant. In a culture where human expression can be artificially generated and stripped of its humanity, sensory art insists on the presence of a body. A story is no longer simply witnessed but breathed in and swallowed, becoming inseparable from the person experiencing it.

There is something aesthetically compelling about an artwork that is gradually consumed by its audience. Unlike a painting, which remains on the wall long after its viewers have left, a meal cannot be experienced without being changed. Each mouthful alters what was so carefully prepared, until the work no longer exists in the form in which it was first presented. Its disappearance becomes part of the artistic experience itself, inseparable from the pleasure and intimacy of consuming it.

By the end of a dinner-performance, the table bears the traces of what has taken place, but there is no finished object to preserve, no arrangement that can be restored for the next visitor. What was once visible has been swallowed and absorbed, continuing through processes inaccessible to observation, in bodies whose responses remain beyond my control.

When the table is cleared, I can tell you what I served. I cannot tell you what remains of it in someone else’s body, or which part of the evening might return to them unexpectedly, years from now, in the taste of something familiar.

Aftertaste event details:

Queer Recipes Archive (QRA) is an ongoing participatory art project by Lisbon-based transmasculine artist Jo Pereira da Costa and creative studio Aftertaste, exploring how food traditions shape our understanding of gender, identity and the body. Combining live cooking, sensory performance and collective zine-making, the project invites participants to rewrite inherited recipes and contribute to a growing archive of alternative culinary traditions.

Queer Recipes Archive, Volume 2: How to Crack an Egg

5 November 2026: Chats Palace, Homerton, London

How to Crack an Egg takes the Portuguese bifana, a traditional pork sandwich, as its starting point. Through live cooking and storytelling, the performance explores masculinity, reproduction and transmasculine experience, reimagining the dish by transforming its ingredients and form. Participants then rewrite the inherited recipe themselves, questioning what traditions preserve, what they exclude and what else they might become.

Booking: https://linktr.ee/Aftertaste.supperclub

Volume 3: Medical Recipe — planned for January 2027 at Art House.

Peckham, London, November 2026:

Booking: https://linktr.ee/Aftertaste.supperclub

Duration: Approximately 1 hour 45 minutes. Events combine performance, live cooking and tasting.