With contributions by: Daniele Lucchini, Dylan Kerr, Lisa Holzer, Lugh O’Neill, Margarita Maximova, Marta De Pascalis, Miiel Ferráez + Clarer Winter and Nadia Marcus 


A performative event and a sculptural installation, European Spirits revolves around traditional gastronomic products and standardized industrial objects; around the discrepancy between market-based macro-communities such as the European Union and its resistant micro-communities. 

In the European Union, food production systems are bound to follow specific regulations. The standardization of manufacturing chains, while supposedly equitable in its intentions, has proven itself as a distinctive weapon of neoliberalism. After the economic crisis of 2008, the so-called PIIGS states (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, and Spain) entered into a deep economic recession caused by the severe austerity laws of the EU: many small-scale producers of traditional gastronomic products were left in a position in which they could not afford the expensive certifications to access the official market. In the case of alcohol distillation, the economic deals affected farmers by granting them the right to produce traditional spirits for personal consumption, while effectively banning them from making any profit out of it. This forced them to rely on a friends-and-family-model of decentralized distribution in which unlabelled reused plastic bottles became vectors for traditional products tied to their original landscape. There is a strange tension between form and content becoming a meeting point between two worlds: the macro-community that defines itself through economic laws produces objects, which will in turn be reused by the micro-community to allow their traditions to survive. What happened in Europe in the last decades is an example of how gastronomic products are not only bound by their shape, market value, or ingredient composition but extend themself to the way they operate within a larger field: how we eat or drink is an occasion for resistance to the industrial standardization of capitalistic fabrication while being an opportunity for reusing the debris of industrial production.

A sculptural installation that is slowly devoured by the public, European Spirits presents itself as a sculptural installation that is slowly devoured by the public, creating a temporary common space around the consumption of homemade liquors. The installation offers to the audience a variety of several liters of homemade spirits from the PIIGS countries in several reused plastic bottles collected over time. Initiated in 2021 by artist Filippo Vogliazzo, the ongoing research project traces recent history from a different perspective – from the dramatic consequences of European austerity to the changing relationship of farmers and craftspeople to their landscapes. Many of the liquors that are still now being produced in the liminal space between a centralized mode of government and the suburbs of the European Union, open the possibility of approaching topics such as globalization and tradition, alternative models of distribution, and official trade markets. From the Poitín of Ireland to the Patxaran of the Basque Countries, the production and consumption of homemade spirits is presented here as a practice deeply intertwined with fights for identity and against imperialism. Through performative interventions by several invited artists, European Spirits invites the audience to raise a glass and cheer with whoever stands next to them, collectively embracing the anti-imperialistic bliss that homemade liquor has to offer.