From studio to dining table:
What a festive spread!

On we travel, to the coast of England East of London, to Margate, home­town of Tracey Emin. Hardly have we shed our coats than she leads us to her bedroom. Today we will of course be eating our meal in bed. While we try and find a comfy way to sit between all the crum­pled sheets and used paper hankies, our host wanders in with a tray bearing caviar and oysters. This trig­gers a festive mood, even if the empty vodka bottles on the bedroom carpet some­what under­mine the sense of idyll. A relic of bygone days, the artist assures us, as she no longer drinks or smokes. She demon­stra­tively (and much to our disap­point­ment) serves not cham­pagne to go with the crus­taceans, but Japanese green tea. Accept­able, we think, at any rate better than half a liter of straw­berry-flavored Nesquik, her previous beverage of choice after a long night’s partying. Emin disap­pears briefly, and emerges again with the main course, home­made chicken soup, flavored with herbs from the vegetable patch in her villa in the south of France. We have soon drunk all the soup, sink back into the pillows and our tummies pleas­antly full, imme­di­ately fall into a soft and blissful sleep.

Across the English Channel to Malakoff, a suburb of Paris. Clad completely in black, wearing dark sunglasses and with a cham­pagne flute in her hand, Sophie Calle opens the door to welcome us into her studio-loft. Jazz music is playing in the back­ground, and the dining table is festively decked out. We give her the gift we have brought, a voucher for an hour with a famous fortune teller, and duly take our places. This time, we’re not alone as Calle has also invited her friends and family. Dominique, Florence, Rafael, Monique – they’re all hanging from the walls in the form of stuffed animals and prove to be poor conver­sa­tion­al­ists. When Calle starts serving dinner, we see red. Not because we find the food repul­sive, but because she has created a completely mono­chrome meal: There are filleted toma­toes, beef tartar, pome­granate seeds, grilled red capsicums, and several bottles of red wine. Ketchup would have fitted the scheme, but we don’t dare ask whether she has some hidden away some­where. As the evening draws to a close, Calle repairs to a chaise-longue and asks us to read her a good-night story before we leave. While hunting for the right book on one of the book­shelves, we notice a small lens unob­tru­sively placed behind the volumes. We defi­nitely don’t mention it; after all, we’re no spoil­sports. Why should we have anything against this becoming an unfor­get­table evening?

The first thing we notice when step­ping into his apart­ment in Stock­holm is the loud sound of birds twit­tering coming from one of the rooms. Carsten Höller sees our ques­tioning looks and mentions that a couple of dozen song­birds which he keeps as pets live there. We drift past his spot­lessly clean stain­less-steel kitchen (has he ever cooked in it?) and suddenly find ourselves zipping down a spiraling tunnel-slide, landing slightly confused two stories down in a spacious living room fitted out in a Mini­malist Nordic vein. Some­what surprised we see before us a dining table on which a mass of take-away boxes is stacked. He simply didn’t have time to cook today, the artist apol­o­gizes, but luckily his favorite restau­rant, “The Brutal­ists”, has deliv­ered a complete festive meal. Each box contains a single ingre­dient, caringly prepared: here a grey giant prawn, there a Mexican ant. In fact, Höller even dispatched one of his pets to the restau­rant kitchen on our behalf, and now it’s returned as song-bird confit. He assures us that one of his pet birds is only ever served on special occa­sions. It is the dessert that crowns the evening, however, and Höller himself prepared it: caramelized toad­stool, served on a bed of moss. Sadly, we can’t for all the world remember what happened next.