<<{{ A Burrito Truck }}>>

The Project - A Burrito Truck

A Burrito Truck has been formally invited to participate in the 2008 Prelude Festival.

PRELUDE '08 is a mini-festival and symposium celebrating and
discussing the very best of new and unconventional performance being
created by NYC-based theatre artists and companies. The weekend will
feature short performances, readings, and open rehearsals with a
focus on works-in-progress for the upcoming 2008-09 season and beyond.
PRELUDE '08 gives audiences the rare chance to see the work of NYC's
most distinctive contemporary artists under one roof. Experience the
in-progress work of the city's most exciting, unconventional artists –
with all performances followed by talkbacks with artists.

September 24-27, 2008

A Burrito Truck is a traveling live food-performance radical hospitality unit, offering free savory bean & cheese burritos, live radio transmission & broadcast, media projections, and the experience of gifting and barter.

A live culinary performance of frugality and hospitality. Three days a week, artist Raul Vincent Enriquez will drive out into diverse neighborhoods in New York with a leased & converted ice-cream truck. Enriquez will have webcams and surveillance devices attached to his hands and feet, and will mic the counter, capturing conversations with participants while doling out his famous savory bean and cheese burritos. Video and audio will be streamed live on the internet, and transmitted via low-power fm radio transmission in the immediate range of the truck. Each day he goes out, Enriquez will stay out until he gives away approximately 100 free burritos.

The audio feed from the Burritomobile will comprise audio captured from the counter mic, the sounds of cooking, and occasional dj sets. As a sound artist with 20 years' experience in audio design for theater, Enriquez will introduce a unique stream and broadcast style. He will also compose a jingle for the ice-cream truck's speakers – and the truck itself will be a work of art, decorated with paintings commissioned by New York artists. The Burrito Truck will be trackable online via GPS and will have a dedicated webpage with photos, streams, and audio.

Burritos will be offered for a suggested donation, so food vending license will not be needed. The cost of ingredients runs to about $300 for 100 burritos; suggested donation prices will vary according to neighborhood. The truck will follow prescribed patterns 2 out of the 3 days per week that it goes out, and follow a random path 1 of the 3. The prescribed routes will be planned according to various criteria: for instance, they will follow the path of gentrification (get a high suggested donation in an upwardly mobile neighborhood, and a low one in the neighborhood people have been forced to move to -- for instance, $10 in Williamsburg, then $1 in Bushwick; $10 in DUMBO, $1 in Downtown Brooklyn). He will make special stops to various homeless shelters in the city and feed anyone willing to eat.

Ultimately the goal of the project is the performance itself, so the final form is the interaction between the artist and participants, and the enjoyment of the burritos. However, there will be a webpage where an archive of performance documentation will be available.

His history in theater as a designer with Reza Abdoh’s Dar a Luz company taught him that work should be engaging, challenging, confrontational, and palpable (concretely experiential). But his experience, growing up, with the dynamic of hospitality (sometimes intrusive, confrontational, and almost obsessive), has also strongly informed this project. His mother and mothers everywhere, their cooking and their manners.

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I work to create moments in which something real, true, and often uncomfortable (but at its base, beautiful) breaks the bonds of expectation, habit, or social convention. My work is saturated with emotional vulnerability, but as frank as possible. Somewhere between hospitality and frugality, between invitation and challenge, I create a space where my audience can truly experience – and digest – an artwork.
Using live culinary arts, video projections, sound, animation, and photography, I offer my guests radical and overwhelming hospitality. Burritos, a humble staple of Chicano cuisine, are the offerings I cook and serve while mixing my projections.

The disruption of expectations. Participants are subjects, collaborators, audience. I try to make the experience of a live event into a performance of gifting and barter, a play of provocation, seduction, hospitality, manners, supply and demand. I create an environment that provokes participants’ responses— my desire is to create a unique bond with an audience of mostly strangers, a bond that will last long after the performance is over. Impressive hospitality can be seen as a sign of status. I see the event of hospitality as a unique nexus where human behavioral codes cross.

Past Burrito Events

Savory Pinto Bean and Cotija Cheese Burritos Spiced with Fresh Salsa Verde, Fresh Cilantro, Tomatos, Onions and a Dash of Chilpotle.

All burritos are hand made by me on the spot

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The Robert Beck Memorial Cinema
Galapagos Art Space
Sine
NTUSA
New Museum of Contemporary Art
Cal Arts
NYU Performance Studies
Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions
One Million Forgotten Moments
New York Theatre Workshop
Lisa Cooley Gallery
Conduit Gallery
I in the Sky/chashama