BELLA CARDIM

Table of Contents emerges from an ongoing investigation into longing and desire, materialized through a participatory installation centered on a dining table and a single question: What are you hungry for?

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Porcelain plates are offered as blank surfaces. Visitors are invited to inscribe them with words, fragments, drawings, and confessions. Hunger here exceeds food. It moves toward memory, intimacy, ambition, rest, and recognition. It names what is missing and what insists.

 

As the plates accumulate, the work becomes a collective index of desire. Individual gestures gather into a shared structure, and the table shifts from a site of consumption to a site of articulation. What is usually swallowed becomes visible.

 

My practice has long examined the family table as a territory where nourishment and control coexist, where affection and discipline blur, and where belonging is negotiated through the body. In Table of Contents, the plate no longer carries food. It becomes a page. Each inscription operates as a chapter within a collective narrative. Private longings enter a shared structure, forming an unfolding table of contents written by many hands.