Soûlographie, a drinking performance.
Since the dawn of time, mankind has been mixing alcoholic beverages to make them more drinkable. Was it an expedient enabling sailors to swallow their daily ration of lemon to combat scurvy? An attempt to make the drinks that colonial powers administered to themselves to ward off the effects of mosquitoes more interesting? Or simply a way of avoiding facing up to the misery of life in the fields, industry and serfdom? Whatever the case, the cocktail was initially a mode of survival – a way of increasing resistance to hostile forces. That this resistance could become political is what immediately worried the authorities of all kinds, who never ceased to regulate the consumption of alcohol, while taking their tithes from its sale. Because alcohol, ingested above all by the working masses, makes people unpredictable. Unlike anaesthetics of all kinds that the powers that be watch us swallow without flinching (prozac, sleeping pills), alcohol, like tobacco or coffee, is one of what Balzac called the “modern excitants”. We never know where excitement might take us – what revolutions it might lead us to….