During my residency at the Contemporary Art Center of Carcassonne, I undertook a critical digestion of the local culinary heritage. My tool: an installation entitled Patrimoines Digestes. My subject: cassoulet. A monument of terroir, an identity bastion, a myth in sauce — I take it literally and head-on: molded, chromed, canned.

The project, in perpetual fermentation, now unfolds as a protocol-based work. A sculptural device composed of a metal shelving unit, a table, two chairs, two pairs of gloves, two archive boxes (one an exact copy of the other), chromed sausages immersed in a mute syrup, 20 kg of curing salt, beans from the Lauragais, and three cassoulet cubes in ceramic, also chromed, as if escaped from a mausoleum of kitchen-fiction.

At the heart of the device: a framed activation ritual. The archive boxes contain the project’s documents — notes, sketches, recipes, correspondence — accessible upon request, but manipulable exclusively by city hall services. The work thus becomes a space of delayed access, of prior authorization. Heritage under seal, or nearly so.

This is not about provocation, but auscultation. What remains of a dish when the meat is removed, yet the form, gestures, and symbolic weight are preserved? The imagined — or fantasized — production of a hundred cubic vegan cassoulets disrupts the automatisms of tradition. The taste vanishes, the form persists. And vice versa.

Chrome, for its part, overplays the shine of the museum: too smooth, too clean, too polished to be honest. It refers to the vitrification of folklore, to the embalmed taste of frozen transmission. Facing it, the archive boxes replay the archive: visible but untouchable, duplicated, ambiguous. History in duplicate, to be handled with gloves — literally.

The table and chairs await a meeting that may never take place. The salt speaks as much of preservation as of embalming. The beans become pieces of evidence, oscillating between authenticity and pastiche. And the gloves suggest a thwarted contact — like caressing a relic without ever reaching it.

Patrimoines Digestes thus proposes a space of sensitive archive, of critical sculpture, and of culinary fiction, where cassoulet becomes symptom, tool, and pretext. The installation is part of a broader research into what can be preserved, what can be shared, what can be digested — or not.

It is not a matter of freezing heritage, but of exposing it to trials: of time, of gaze, of contradiction. To digestion too — whether literal, social, or symbolic. And to leave, on the tongue, not with an answer, but with a texture, a word, a doubt.