Gabriel N. Gee is Associate Professor in Art History at Franklin University, Switzerland. His current research interests rooted in contemporary aesthetics looks at the changing imaginaries of our interconnected global cultures, in particular through industrial heritage, port cities, and natural environments, with particular case studies in Europe and Southeast Asia, paying attention to the potential of artistic research to open new spaces for cultural dialogue and innovation. Recent publications include a co-edited volume on Mobile Soils (TETI Press, 2021), and on “Maritime Poetics: from coast to hinterland” (Transcript Verlag 2021). Gabriel co-founded TETI Group in 2011, and guides the group’s activities to this day.

Notes on the Migration of recipes and their containers
On a marina in the port of Valencia, Spain, a little café offers drinks and tapas to boat owners and passers-by, sardines a la Plancha, grilled piments, but also cod croquettes fried in oil. Cod recipes can be traced back to the cuisine of numerous Southern European port cities, no least that of Genoa, Venice, and Lisbon. Yet the catch itself has long needed increasingly distant transportation to fill the desire of local clientèles. The café itself is charmingly improvised in a repurposed shipping container, a symbol of maritime globalisation associated with growing ecological pressure, which the nearby terminal towering above the scene anchors in tangible reality. This brief reflection aims to consider the imbrication of migration in culinary traditions in parallel to the vehicles of food transportation, from the amphora to the shipping container, considered in their ambiguous potentials as global agents.