︎

A Prelude:
The Tincture, The Fluid,
The Comestible, The Vapor

Text: Andreas Engman  
Visual Identity & Graphic Design: Punxh Peerasin Hutaphaet
Curator: Bruno Alves de Almeida
Printing: Jan van Eyck Academie, Printing & Publishing Lab



In this off-world myth and surreal political allegory about institutions as bodies and eating as ritual, we get to follow a bureaucrat-turned-insurgent who uses bizarre “gustatory rituals” to smuggle transformative matter into authoritarian systems, turning meals, smells, and digestion into acts of resistance. Set in a dystopian future governed by HypnoTech corporations and bureaucratic overreach, a clandestine Guild wages its quiet insurgency through acts of tasting, swallowing, inhaling, and anointing, as though ingestion itself were a form of revolution. Institutions are turned into living bodies, politics into a digestive system, and the self is treated as something unstable, always at risk of being transformed, contaminated, or unmade. Food is never merely food; it is threshold, threat, and metamorphosis. The result, a speculative theory disguised as a fever dream about food, power, and possession.

.  .  .

A short story written for the occasion of the symposium
Artistic Prefigurations, Institutional Becomings, curated by Bruno Alves De Almeida
and organized by the Jan van Eyck Academie, on 28th and 29th May, 2026.
The symposium is developed within the European Cooperation Project
Institution(ing)s: Co-Creating Inclusive and Sustainable European Art Institutions.