As part of the European Heritage Days, artist Maria Alcaide is offering a performance walk inspired by Zola's "Ventre de Paris", in which she invites us to travel back in time and discover the gastro-social transformations of central Paris right up to the present day.

In "Le Ventre de Paris", Zola paints a social picture set against a backdrop of everyday stories. In fact, Zola was one of the first novelists to use ordinary people and events, the petty squabbles between fishmongers and pork butchers at Les Halles, to write his novels. On the menu for this tour, you'll look at the extent to which the food metaphor expresses contemporary society's vision of the world, ending with a little dessert: a picture of an era dominated by its appetites.

Maria Alcaide is a storyteller. Her projects usually take the form of installations combining video, sculpture, performance or gastronomy. Her work begins with research into an existing subject, real or immaterial, a fact or a place, and ends with a story. She invents a universe from a combination of different characters, art or decorative objects, non-functional objects, books, women, workers, dissident bodies and animals. The adventures she tells us reflect our fears and desires, but never fail to remind us that laughter is necessary to reveal the atrocity that human nature can sometimes be.

More information on the event can be found here.