Some of what was said when Carsten Höller spoke with @gagosian directors Serena Cattaneo Adorno and Mark Francis about the terminology, the importance of experimentation, and the fortuitous side effects of brutalist cuisine. MF: Do you think that Stockholm is a particularly interesting place to do a project of this sort? Does the food that’s seasonally or geographically available make it more possible? Or is it something that you could imagine doing in Japan or Mexico or anywhere you wanted? CH: I think you can basically do it anywhere you want. But a place like Stockholm, which has a very strong seasonality—the harsh winter and the almost continental summer—organically brings a lot of change during the year that makes the process interesting. That said, if you think about existing cuisines in some countries, aspects of their traditions have brutalist cuisine as part of the spectrum. In Italy, for instance, if you just forget about the olive oil that they put on everything—[laughs] sorry, Serena—they have beautiful brutalist dishes, like the preparation of cuttlefish in the south. In Spain, you have some tapas that are basically brutalist. And I would say that Japan is probably the country in the world where people eat in a brutalist fashion already. SCA: Brutalism famously sought to adopt earlier principles of postwar design, when reconstruction was a necessity. If you apply this to food, is it your intention to reconstruct and simplify our view of nature to better appreciate it? Are you bringing things back to something that is much purer in a society where value has been put elsewhere? CH: Yes. If you want to understand something, you must separate it from the rest. From this line of thinking, it became clear that the project needed to be modeled against vegetarianism. It’s disrespectful of the living plant or mushroom to say, “I’m not eating meat, but I’m killing lots of other organisms anyhow.” This is a question about life and arriving at a radical definition of it.