Transforming the Italian Body Politic with Futurist Food

Ramaswamy, Lea

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Transforming the Italian Body Politic with Futurist Food

Ramaswamy, Lea

Abstract

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Manifesto della Cucina Futurista was first published in the Turin-based Gazzetta del Popolo on December 28, 1930. Despite the widespread public backlash against the manifesto’s desire to revolutionise the Italian diet with the aim of spiritually and materially transforming the Italian body politic, the Futurist culinary venture was materialised into a restaurant, a colonial pavilion, numerous culinary lectures, multiple banquets, and a book-length publication titled La Cucina Futurista (1932) by Marinetti and Futurist artist Luigi Colombo Fillìa. Previous studies of Futurist cuisine, limited as they are, tend to focus on either the avant-garde dimensions of Futurist cuisine — its edible food sculptures and theatrical dinner sets — or the political implications of the movement’s engagement with autarchic policies and its rampant espousal of violence, xenophobia, misogyny, and the cults of youth and sport in alignment with the Fascist regime. These differentiated studies conform to a historiographical phenomenon which splits Futurism into two phases, favouring ‘early’ Futurism (1909-1916) as more pure and aesthetically innovative than the Futurism that followed. This thesis finds it more pertinent to ask, instead: what continuities existed between Futurist cuisine and the early years of the movement? Through the analysis of the manifesto and its subsequent physical, visual, and textual expansions as well as the critical reading of its near and far reception, it emerges that Futurist cuisine was a polemic proclamation against middle class conformity whose reactionary right-wing politics did not compromise its uninterrupted use of avant-garde tactics, or vice versa. This thesis holds that the exclusion of Futurist cuisine from the art historical canon cannot be viewed any longer as a simple oversight, but a reflection of the field at large, its biases, and its deep infatuation and need to preserve a neutral account of Futurism, for the role the movement performs in the overwriting Fascist politics from the Italian contribution to modern art.