Exhibitions
Sant Stomak takes over Rome: ritual, food and urban drift in Miralda's itinerant project
On March 28, 2026, the Royal Spanish Academy in Rome hosted STMK TRIP.ROMA , an artistic event conceived by Antoni Miralda in collaboration with FoodCultura and the Fondazione Baruchello. The project is part of STMK TRIP 2025–2026, a journey through various Italian cities centered around Sant Stomak , a ritual and performative figure created by Miralda and Montse Guillén as a tool for collective reflection on food, memory, and the social rituals associated with eating.
Since 2008, the FoodCultura Foundation has celebrated Sant Stomak every October 16th, coinciding with World Food Day as declared by the FAO. This celebration takes the form of a participatory ritual that invites participants to question the tensions of the contemporary food system—between scarcity and abundance, tradition and consumption—and to explore the cultural and symbolic dimension of food in social life.
In 2015, Miralda, together with the Flores & Prats studio, developed a reliquary-furniture piece inspired by a Neapolitan brass ex-voto found in the archives of the MUCEM in Marseille. This object gave materiality to Sant Stomak, conceived as a “nomadic and itinerant saint” linked to conviviality, agrobiodiversity, and metabolic balance.
The STMK TRIP project revives this figure to activate a series of contemporary processions that, inspired by traditional pilgrimages, explore displacement, encounter, and community building through ritual, food, and public space. During its passage through Rome, Sant Stomak becomes the central figure in a performative action that proposes interpreting the city as an urban palimpsest, interwoven with layers of history, infrastructure, and everyday practices.
The day was structured in three parts. It began at dawn, at 6:00 a.m., with the departure from the Royal Spanish Academy in Rome towards the Grande Raccordo Anulare, the ring road that encircles the city. This initial route presents the GRA as a symbolic device from which to rethink the relationship between center and periphery, transforming this infrastructure into a ritual landscape that Sant Stomak “devours” in a circular gesture.
Between 8:30 and 9:30 a.m., an open breakfast was held at Porta San Pancrazio, in the Bar Gianicolo. This event invited citizens and groups—from motorcycle associations to taxi drivers, motorcycle clubs, and Vespa clubs—to join the experience, broadening the participatory nature of the project.
Next, from 10:00 to 11:30 a.m., the Urban Tour takes place: a motorized caravan that will travel through different parts of Rome, connecting historical monuments with spaces marked by contemporary transformations. This tour aims to subvert conventional tourist routes and question dominant narratives about the city.
The event culminated between 12:00 and 13:00 with “Sant Stomak Meets San Pietro,” a final procession from the Gianicolo to the Tempietto del Bramante, at the headquarters of the Academy. There, the reliquary was installed, and a ritual of offerings focused on food, digestion, hunger, and daily habits took place.
STMK TRIP.ROMA is thus configured as a dynamic experience that combines movement, ritual, and public space to activate new ways of thinking about the city through food. In its journey from Naples to Venice, the project offers a critical reflection on food culture and its global contradictions, inviting us to imagine other ways of inhabiting, sharing, and giving meaning to the everyday.
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