The upcoming SOUPER, a gathering at midnight, will be inspired by night gardens. The dinner will take place in December 2025 and January 2026. More updates will follow via Instagram.
For quite some time TAFEL has the image of a nocturnal gathering around food with an intimate group of people, starting in the midst of the night. To eat together at midnight creates an opportunity to taste and digest during the quiet, less dense, welcome solitude of nocturnal atmospheres. It also connects on a cosmic level: the cycle of day and night and the movement of planets around the sun. At midnight the sun is furthest away. It is a magical hour that welcomes dreams, eerie thoughts and fantasies. It is a moment of ‘world-ing’ and gravitating towards each other.
Now, what could it mean eat at midnight? Darkness undermines the domination of vision and asks to use the other senses to open up to otherworldly sensations and deep listening. It is an invitation to discover the nightly rhythm collectively, to be astonished and enchanted and to find territory within the night not yet/to be colonized by light and daytime capitalist impositions. This midnight dinner could be a flickering, ephemeral gathering at an untimely hour to let us escape the normative linearity of time and let us reflect on the co-production of reality and knowledge with subjects and objects surrounding us (cf. astroparticle physics). I hope this assembly of vibrating bodies, nurturing and storytelling brings forth the first tune of a new sonic cosmogony.
