On the Tip of Her Tongue
On the Tip of Her Tongue is an ongoing exploration of food as a narrative medium — a way of telling women’s stories through taste, scent, temperature, and gesture rather than through image or explanation.
Developed as a site-specific performance, the project transforms restaurants into both stage and script. Each edition unfolds as a five-course meal, where every dish functions as a chapter in a woman’s life. The story is not represented or spoken; it is embodied. Meaning emerges through the act of eating — through digestion, breath, and sensation — allowing the body itself to become an archive.
At the centre of each iteration is one woman, often the cook or owner of an immigrant- or woman-run restaurant. Her kitchen, recipes, rhythms, and gestures shape the dramaturgy of the evening. Around her, the table becomes a collective stage where care, labour, endurance, and intimacy are re-read as artistic materials rather than domestic background.
The project is rooted in the belief that women’s stories often carry a quiet, radical power — one that resists verbal articulation. Food holds embodied knowledge: social, historical, emotional. By foregrounding taste and smell, On the Tip of Her Tongue challenges the visual dominance of Western art traditions and reclaims so-called “feminine” senses as legitimate tools for knowledge production and artistic expression.
Each performance is collaboratively shaped by artists, chefs, researchers, and diners. The existing architecture and atmosphere of the restaurant — its textures, sounds, and rituals — become active scenographic forces. Performer and audience dissolve into shared authorship; eating becomes participation.
Beyond the restaurant, the project also extends into gallery contexts through exhibitions that document, reinterpret, and re-stage its sensorial materials. This movement — from kitchen to gallery — is a deliberate feminist gesture, blurring the boundaries between domestic labour and fine art, and insisting that taste, scent, and embodied memory belong within contemporary artistic discourse.
The first edition of On the Tip of Her Tongue will be developed during my residency at Duplex AiR, Lisbon, between February and April 2026. The conceptual foundation for this edition comes from a text published on Substack, which you can read here:
https://substack.com/home/post/p-183506288
Over time, the project will grow into a living anthology of women’s stories told through food — tracing migration, intimacy, labour, and belonging across different cultural contexts. Future editions will be developed in collaboration with female chefs, food workers, writers, and researchers, including dialogues with scholars from fields such as food studies, anthropology, and sensory research (e.g. SOAS, NYU).
If you have questions, would like to collaborate, or are interested in hosting or developing a future edition, you’re warmly invited to get in touch:
joanapereiradcosta@gmail.com
This is not a project about food as spectacle.
It is about food as memory.
Food as knowledge.
Food as a language that has always been there — waiting to be tasted.
Cuming Out
Cuming Out is an ongoing exploration of the politics of the gaze, desire, and authorship through a woman’s body. Moving between confession, memory, and resistance, this piece examines how femininity is performed, consumed, and eventually reclaimed.
Through shifting light, sound, and language, it traces a journey from objectification to self-possession — from coming out as spectacle to coming in as self. Blurring eroticism with intellect, the work redefines intimacy as authorship and softness as an act of defiance.
Cuming Out explores the relationship between the gaze, the body, and authorship — what happens when a woman stops performing for the lens and begins to write herself back into being.
The performance unfolds through layers of exposure — physical, emotional, and technological — blurring pleasure with performance. It’s a story about reclaiming the body from the gaze, about learning to come in before one can truly come out.
Excerpt
My nights no longer filled with men,
Are steeped in eroticism—
The pencil, my desire,
The ink, my release.
I script my own story,
One that I no longer need to perform.The pencil drives my thoughts,
Penetrating my inner world—
And the ink spills, alive with graphite cum.
I feel the pleasure of my mind unfurling,
A quiet orgasm of intellect.One that comes not from
Touch and flesh,
But from a thought-filled mesh—
Electrified by ideas and imagination
Igniting the spark of creation.
Cuming Out is an ongoing performance project about unlearning the male gaze — a study of pleasure as authorship, vulnerability as rebellion, and softness as a radical act.
Bloodlines
Bloodlines is a poetic monologue written as a letter between mother and daughter, exploring how womanhood is inherited through silence, ritual, and the body. Moving through scenes of menstruation, aging, and memory, the work examines how patriarchal narratives shape female identity across generations.
Through its intimate language and cyclical rhythm, Bloodlines reclaims the body as both archive and author — transforming blood from a mark of shame into a medium of remembrance, resilience, and rebirth.
There’s a quiet inheritance that moves through the women in a family.
Bloodlines began as a letter to my mother and became a reflection on the unspoken transmissions that pass between generations: beauty, shame, silence, resilience. It explores menstruation, aging, and the body as both archive and battleground — a site where love, loss, and social expectation converge.
Excerpt
Today, my body prepared a cradle
For a life that never came.
Oestrogen and progesterone
Wove a nest of hope,
Only to unravel it in red threads.Each month, this ritual repeats—
A cycle of creation and loss,
Of potential unfulfilled,
Of a self not yet claimed.My body weeps for a life not yet mine—
For freedoms deferred,
For choices unmade,
For autonomy surrendered
To scripts written by others.Each drop a lament
For the liberty I have yet to grasp.
In this piece, I use blood as a metaphor for lineage — the flow of bodily and emotional knowledge passed from mother to daughter. The work moves through cycles of menstruation and menopause, linking them to ideas of autonomy, memory, and inherited silence.
Bloodlines is part of my ongoing exploration of feminist embodiment and sensory storytelling — how the body remembers, how it resists, and how it can reclaim its voice through texture, rhythm, and ritual.
A Scent’s Caress
A Scent’s Caress is a visceral, immersive one-woman play that explores the aftermath of sexual assault through the rarely privileged sense of smell. Blending poetic monologue, scent diffusion, and physical performance, it dismantles the hierarchy of the senses, centering an embodied, feminine way of knowing. Moving between raw recollection and sensory intimacy, the work traces a journey from erasure and absence to the reclamation of self through the primal language of scent, propelled by a quiet yet unyielding urgency to move beyond pain without surrendering tenderness. The result is a deeply personal yet universal meditation on trauma, intimacy, and the body’s power to remember—and to heal—beyond sight, touch, or words.
Smell is an archive the body writes in silence.
It lingers, stains, and survives beyond touch — a trace that holds both pleasure and pain.
In A Scent’s Caress, I explore scent as a language of intimacy and survival. It speaks where words fracture, transforming trauma into breath, absence into presence. This ongoing performance asks what remains after the body is no longer seen, and whether healing can exist in something as ephemeral as air.
Excerpt
Intimacy did not unfold in his presence—
It first revealed itself to me when the air was emptied of him—
in the subtle traces left behind.His scent lingers on my pillow—
An invisible caress,
Penetrating me through each inhalation—
Not just smell;
A memory…
A stain of his being.In his fragrance I found the connection I was looking for.
One that didn’t demand a glimpse,
Touch,
Or even proximity.His absence not a void but safety,
A space to sit with the remnants of him.The scent weaved itself into my breath,
A tapestry of reciprocity,
Draping over my lungs,
Lacing through my bloodstream—
Dissipating into unspoken places—
Between my ribs,
The soft hollow of my diaphragm,
The unseen reaches of my being.
Scent in this work is not a metaphor — it is a medium. It dissolves the distance between audience and performer, inviting inhalation instead of observation. To breathe becomes an act of empathy; to exhale, a quiet surrender.
A Scent’s Caress is part of my ongoing research into sensory storytelling and feminist embodiment. I’m interested in how scent can carry memory, trauma, and desire — how it allows for stories to be told without words, without gaze, without touch. Through it, I hope to challenge the hierarchy of the senses and reclaim the body’s quieter forms of communication — the ones that can only be felt.