Ali&Cia’s urbanophagy ceremonies

For over fifteen years the Madrid-based Eat Art group Ali&Cia has built up an extensive repertoire of projects in which aspects of reality (clothing, urban and natural landscapes) are reinterpreted through food in a fantastical semiotic game of illusion and visual pun, and then devoured collectively. A type of public performance art, these collective actions are participatory in their creation, presentation and in their final consumption by all those that attend the grand rituals of catharsis. This article examines Ali&Cia’s urbanophagy events, where edible cities are collaboratively cooked, constructed and then eaten.