PhD student 2024-2027
Félixe Kazi-Tani is conducting an inquiry into what modern table cultures of European influence contain. Here, “table cultures” refer to an articulated set of individual and collective practices, ranging from food preparation to etiquette, including domestic economy, dietetics, and interior design. Associated with family care and comfort, the art of living, the development of taste, collective identity, and conviviality, these practices nonetheless remain a matrix for the hierarchization of class, gender, and race, contributing to the normalization of bodies, even down to their most intimate metabolic and biological functions. They are well documented through a number of editorial objects such as cookbooks and etiquette books. This practical literature participates in the circulation and naturalization of ideological and political discourses and narratives: it promotes and solidifies, within recipes and recommendations on domestic life, a bourgeois-inspired social organization where genders, ages, classes, and races are carefully separated and differentiated, assigned to specific tasks and behaviors.
Through the collection and assemblage of documents and artifacts, which serve as clues to this conditioning through the stomach, Félixe Kazi-Tani aims to produce a critical and situated “historiconography,” relying on an expanded understanding of editorial design, based on the following practical and theoretical hypotheses: the reproduction of documents as a mode of historical and historiographical reappropriation and transmission; the material rearrangements of scholarly documentary resources as a testing ground for theoretical and political debates through materiality and form ; and the tactical practices of editorial design as matrices for collective, materialized and publishable critical thinking.
· Fields : visual arts, anthropology, history
· Doctoral school: currently being defined
· Director: Samir Boumediene, CNRS/IHRIM
· Co-supervision: Joan Ayrton
Biography
An alumni of the post-graduate art&research program from ENSBA Lyon (Class of 2023) and the research program at ENSAD (Art, Design & Society lab), Félixe is also a founding member of the graphic research collective Bye Bye Binary and holds a vocational degree in Bakery, having previously worked as a teacher and designer-researcher (Cité du Design, ESADSE, CoDesign Lab Télécom ParisTech).
Their work exists at the intersection of history, editorial design, and visual arts. They seek a path between disciplines that allows them to share and discuss their research, balancing the power of publishing as an organizer of thought and knowledge on one hand, and the installation, which can make a space of criticality inhabitable, on the other.
Having contributed to the curation of the 2017 International Design Biennale and the French Pavilion at the 2019 Milan Triennale, Félixe’s work has been presented at the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation, macLyon, SUBS, Marcelle Alix Gallery, Photo Saint Germain, and others.
