Data / Ora
Date(s) - 16/10/2025 - 16/11/2025
6:30 pm - 9:00 pm
Categorie
Since 2008, every October 16, the FoodCultura Foundation (Barcelona), founded by artist Antoni Miralda and chef Montse Guillén, has activated the collective celebration of Saint Stomak. Coinciding with World Food Day proclaimed by the FAO, this ritualistic and performative celebration, was born with the intention of contributing to the global debate on food and the contradictions present in our societies (hunger–obesity, malnutrition–ultra-processed foods, tourism–migration…), while always taking into account the wide set of beliefs, values, customs, techniques, and representations.
In 2015, Miralda, in collaboration with architects Flores&Prats, designed a reliquary in wood and gold leaf that embodies the figure of the saint. Since then, Saint Stomak has been installed and celebrated in different cities and institutions such as the Boqueria Market in Barcelona, the elBulli Foundation of Ferran Adrià, and at the FoodCultura/Cádiz. Now in its 17th edition, the celebration of Saint Stomak expands with the intention of making its meaning known to a wider audience. For this reason, the festivities are decentralized and multiplied: in addition to the traditional offering reception that will take place on October 19 at FoodCultura in Barcelona, Saint Stomak also arrives in Naples on October 16, 2025, as the first stop of its STMK TRIP 2025–2026 through several Italian cities. Based on digestion as a metaphor for the processes of shaping reality, the project proposes an update of the concept of pilgrimage as a dialogue between tradition and contemporary rituals; between the sacred and the profane, between art and popular culture.
www.foodcultura.org
archivo@foodcultura.org
9 ottobre 2025/draft
“It resembles no other contemporary representation whatsoever, it has nothing to do with the tradition of happenings. In Miralda’s celebrations one invariably rediscovers a whole set of
traditional rites that are provocatively projected into the future.”
— Umberto Eco, 1988
“Miralda’s artistic practice is above all collective and compensates for the lack of social actions that allow a community to recognize itself. It revives the urban space, too often
degraded in our time, restoring to it its dimension as a place of life and relationships.”
— François Burkhardt, 1995
PASSEGGIATA, VISIT AND OFFERING IN NAPLES
The Saint Stomak PASSEGGIATA in Naples can be considered a return to its origins, as its image is inspired by a Neapolitan ex-voto that Miralda found in the archives of the MUCEM
in Marseille. For its 17th edition, Saint Stomak brings its ritual into the streets. It is not simply about walking, but about nurturing the path with collective gestures. The ritual can thus be defined as a form of communication without words, in which the processional gesture provides a new or unexpected perspective on public space.
Saint Stomak walks, dialoguing with and paying tribute both to formal architecture and to the everyday and the informal; it invites passersby to participate and to discover the city and its
minor monuments together.
“The centuries-old social promiscuity means that, from the humblest homes to noble palaces, everything is inspired by the spatial osmosis guaranteed by thresholds that, depending on the case, are popular or grand. Here, the use of urban space as an extension of the private is at the heart of domesticity and often gives rise to practices of spatial hybridization: on the one hand, one sees an outward projection of domestic life in the low Neapolitan houses; on the other, one perceives a true introjection of the urban macrocosm into the microcosm of the dwelling, with the typical courtyard model with an open staircase at the back. In a continuous interaction between inside and outside, between public and private, between man and his context…” (Paola Buccaro)
The walk, therefore, does not break into the city as a foreign element, but blends with its urban rhythms, which “mark rituality and outline the movements of the human body” where “…the pace of traversing public space recovers a vital slowness in clear contrast with the
tempos of globalization.” (ibid.) Everyone is invited to join this urban walk, which will cross the historic center of Naples!
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