Resident Profile - Céline Pelcé

Resident at Les Ateliers de Paris between 2015 and 2017, Céline Pelcé's career is rooted in space design, which she studied at the Ecole Boulle, and in culinary design, at the ESAD in Reims.

Initially carrying out these two activities in parallel, it is mainly as an interior designer that she joins the incubator, associated with Géraud Pellottiero. In 2017, Céline decided to leave this field to devote herself to the culinary arts as an art and design medium.

For the past two years, Céline Pelcé has been exploring the relationship between human beings and the landscapes they inhabit, through the experience of the body, and specifically, through the act of eating. In order to activate this research, Céline Pelcé creates gustatory performances, meals mixing narratives and rituals, and edible and participative installations.

Her explorations take shape through numerous collaborations with designers, craftspeople, chefs and artists, in order to cross media for a common narrative. She has notably worked with the design unit of Lab-Ah in the hospital environment, collaborated with the foodlab of the Jan Van Eyck Academy (NL), and more recently worked with the lacquer artist Flore Falcinelli to create a manifesto meal in Japan.

As a Villa Kujoyama laureate, Céline conducted her research in residence in Kyoto from September to December 2021. Her project there took as its anchor the Umami considered as the fifth flavour. Largely related to fermentation techniques, Umami invites us to consider time and living territory as key ingredients. Exploring Kyoto's surrounding landscapes with Umami as a metaphor for questions of depth (spatial and gustatory), Céline Pelcé developed two performative projects exploring the forest, in the form of sensory hikes, and the garden, during a meal with buried dishes.

In collaboration with the artist Flore Falcinelli for this last project, the reflection focused on how we, humans, can invite the living and non-human to interfere with our artefacts. Using the depth of the garden, the weather, the rain, the earth, the insects, were the invited designers for the elaboration of these objects, and the eaters dug up their objects, given to the garden 1 month before the meal. As the lacquer material comes from the sap of the lacquer tree (Urushi), the menu, elaborated with the chef Masahiro Tainaka, observed the descent of the winter sap, inviting the eater to prepare for the season. The dishes evoked in turn the fruit, the flower, the leaf... until the root. This project was the subject of a manifesto written by Flore Falcinelli and Céline Pelcé entitled: "Dans l'enchaînement infini des choses. Manifesto for an anthropo-decentred meal".

Nourished by the learning of the Japanese tea ceremony, and the theatrical ritualisation of commensality, Céline Pelcé continues her culinary and landscape itineraries, and will work in residencies in 2022 in the United States, in the Swiss Alps and in the Jura.