A restaurant located in Vienna’s 4th district. It serves food rooted in my father’s cultural background. The sensory experience of eating—grounded in the mouth—becomes a point of departure for understanding how this site holds personal and collective meanings. Situated within Vienna’s urban and cultural landscape, this restaurant also reflects broader conditions of visibility and expectation: what cultural expressions are welcomed in public space. Restaurants, as sites for eating, become sites of translation rather than mere consumption. The restaurant in a diasporic context acts much like the mouth: a mediator between outside and inside. Ingredients from the new environment are incorporated, substituted, or resisted; techniques from the homeland are preserved and adapted. What emerges is not static tradition but a dynamic equilibrium, where culture, like digestion, is an ongoing process.
Within this shared sensory field, food and conversation intertwine. Eating together allows stories to be exchanged not as extracted information but as embodied knowledge. The act of sharing a meal softens the boundary between speaker and listener, undoing the rigid subject-object dynamic that can arise in more formal modes of inquiry like
some interview formats.
The place where we can eat becomes both protective and generative. It safeguards cultural knowledge by embedding it in sensory experience, while also allowing it to evolve through encounters. Digestion and language converge here as parallel systems of care, mechanisms through which individuals and communities sustain themselves relationally. I sense the objects circulating in the restaurant that I am visiting, beginning with the cloth covering the table and the surfaces where the food and the utensils are being placed, where we gather. During a conversation with Tanveer Ahmed about the cloth, I am trying to figure out the many possibilities the fabric is capable of. Using the interview format, which is linked to two fields of interest that influence my artistic practice: non-fiction filmmaking and the various aesthetics in pop culture and so called low-culture.
When I try to think back, it is perhaps one of the first methods I came across that has a firm place in the documentary tradition because of its supposed claim to objectivity. This is also why interviews are used in settings of violence, as an instrument of evidence-making.
On the one hand, I’m looking at critical reflections of this claim, but on the other, I’m attracted to its divergent use in pop culture, as found in fashion and music production, areas that have greatly informed me. Here, it is used as a tool to simulate proximity and to strengthen the idealization and identification with a person. Formally, I like its ability to provide ease of use: the interview format is often closer to spoken language and is therefore more accessible and easier to understand.
It also opens up the relationship between listening and speaking, and between spoken and written words. Rather than positioning the interviewee within a fixed role, this approach understands the interview as a practice shaped by encounter and exchange. It treats the interview less as representation and more as engagement, where relations can
be renegotiated.
Just as the mouth is not solely of biological importance, the restaurant is not only a business but an infrastructure of continuity, places where knowledge about how to remain intact is rehearsed daily. In these spaces, survival is metabolized collectively.
References:
See discussions of Jayce Salloum’s untitled part 1: everything and nothing (1999–2001), which theorize the interview as a relational practice rather than a purely representational form. These discussions further frame the interview as a site from which epistemic and political asymmetries may be renegotiated rather than reproduced.
