THE BANQUET
The Banquet: M’Kenzy Cannon + Maya Rubio is a site-specific installation and day-long series of activations, including screenings, performances, and participatory actions.
Location: Horse Room at The Firehouse (Worcester, MA)
Dates: April 22–30, 2023
“She still hadn’t freed herself of the desire-force-miracle… The formula was repeated time and again: feeling the thing without possessing it.”¹
It’s cold and you’re sweating. The plate is sprouting, ready to love you back, but everyone else has left. Your stomach churns. The banquet is over, or it’s just beginning, and you’re sitting in, and across, a terrain of bitter gratitude, the desire-force-miracle.¹ Come and break bread. The burden of proof is on me.²
Cannon stages environments and object placements that resonate a familiar strangeness. The scene is alive and decaying, and we find ourselves the same. The Banquet is evidence of an interior war between wanting and doing, feeling and possessing, connection and lack. The desire to scratch resolve.
“And suddenly, satisfied, she resumed eating.”¹
- Clarice Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart (1943)
- Louise Bourgeois, translated from her diaries in the monograph edited by Frances Morris (2019)
Table (1) - Performance by M’Kenzy Cannon
Zine
