Since 1997, the performance dinner 70×7 The Meal by Lucy + Jorge Orta’s artist partnership has been staged in many cities around the world. 70×7 The Meal is a collective dinner, organised around one long table complete with a setting of dishes, produced by Limoges (famous French porcelain brand) and inspired by Lucy + Jorge Orta’s drawings. The combination of art and food is the main focus of the performance and becomes an opportunity to stimulate discussions among people coming from all walks of life. 70×7, which in biblical language is symbolic for infinity, is a dinner for seven guests, who invite seven more, and so on, ad infinitum. There is no limit to the repetition of dinners, which represent “open construction sites” or, more precisely, “works in progress”. In this way, each dinner is an “act”: a chapter of a discourse that develops across different times and place, where each dish is unique because it is designed according to the local cuisine. This performance is a dialogue that covers several multisensory languages: the language of taste, but also the visual, performative, sound and symbolic ones.

70×7 The Meal is an installation aiming at stimulating discussions on topics such as food, biodiversity, nomadism, mobility and urban decay. Not surprisingly, the project is rooted in values such as the respect for the environment, the retrieval of food traditions and the improvement of life standards. According to Lucy + Jorge Orta, the creative disciplines should foster everyone’s commitment to improve our planet, our human relations and the dissemination of cultural, political and ecological values. In this collective artistic action, a balance between history and contemporaneity, art and culinary culture, public bodies and private institutions is achieved.

The XLII act of 70X7 The Meal will take place within Ka art. Drawing the collective map of Basilicata, on 21 September 2019 in Latronico, in the dynamic historical and cultural setting of the MULA +. Since 2016, this museum has hosted many musical events, theatre performances, photo exhibitions, book presentation events, outdoor and indoor workshop activities and other meetings and debates. During the performance, one hundred people from all walks of life will be invited to take part in the ritual of an open-air dinner, stimulating discussions on issues that concern our local and global communities. The performance will also see the involvement of the Pollino producers’ network.