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.
