The last few days I was with Hugo and Pascale in Italy where we were filming for my Manifesta 7 piece Art Flavours. For the project I set up an encounter between an Italian critic/writer and curator, Roberto Pinto, and a gelato maker from Rovereto,  Osvaldo Castellari, whose gorgeous Gelateria Bologna in Mori was the location for the filming we just completed. To start the work off Roberto briefed Osvaldo on a small selection of terms (or zones-of-practice) from contemporary art  - The Body, Memory, Spectacle and The Archive - and after this Osvaldo was charged with the not-so-small task of making new gelato flavours to illustrate these concepts. Translating art-thought into tasty ice-cream may not be the easiest job going but it made for a pretty intense few days. I was really lucky in the collaboration/ participation of Roberto Pinto - he was so calm and generous in how he talked with Osvaldo -  smiling and at the same time taking the whole thing seriously, playing it all very calm, on a human scale as we sat in the back yard of gelateria near the cherry trees. I really loved watching the conversation between them even though I didn't understand it that much until the translation came through.

One of those projects where you only realise what you are doing about half way through the thing, or where you are struck repeatedly by these kind of "oh *that's* what it s about" realisations at different points in the process. At the end of Tuesday we were looking at the footage of Roberto and Osvaldo's chat and watching the latter's worried face in close up again and again had me feeling really unsure how the whole thing was going to play out the next day.

Luck was with me regarding the collaborators in the project a second time though. Because as much as Osvaldo was nervous, anxious or even incomprehending at the meeting with Roberto, he was smart and together and full of ideas and energy when it came to making the gelato - what we might have expected I guess but it was still great to see. I had to think a lot about what it is to be a person with a skill, with an affinity for something, with a sense of grace or ownership in a certain zone or practice. It was so great to see Osvaldo in his element, adding fruit for flavourings, whisking up the gelato. And great to hear his reasoning for the choices he made in the flavours too.

In my mind The Archive was always going to be the tricky flavour of the four. Hard to separate from memory (although Roberto did a great job in defining a distinction) and in any case summoning for me the idea of a taste somewhere between dust and yellowing book pages I wasn't finding it the most appealing prospect. For Osvaldo though this all rolled rather differently as he decided that the human brain was the biggest archive we have, and that his response would be to create a complicated flavour, comprising many layers which would really necessitate thought and a trawl through ones mental taste-archives to locate and define its elements. Flavoured with some combination of fresh peach, strawberry and orange juice The Archive ended up as my favourite by quite some distance. Perhaps it was only once Osvaldo was well into his work - adding flavour to the first batch of gelato - that the project became truly tangible to me. I was stood in the big kitchen, watching him and his assistant at work and I was suddenly smiling at the thought that through the summer in Rovereto it will be possible to take a cone of gelato called Memory.

When the Manifesta show opens (19th July) in Rovereto, at Manifattura Tabbachi and Ex Peterlini, you can catch the video of Osvaldo, Roberto and the gelato-making as well as sampling each of the Art Flavours gelati. My piece City Changes - now completed in its sequence of 20 framed texts/drawings - will also be shown for the first time. More details here in the notebook a bit closer to the time.

A few shots from my Art Flavours piece at the opening of Manifesta 7 in Rovereto last  weekend.  Top picture is  the video installed in a tiny washroom space on the ground floor of Manifattura Tabacchi. The other two are at the start of the day, with customers rolling up to sample free gelato flavoured to illustrate terms from the province of contemporary art - Memory, The Spectacle, The Archive and The Body. More info on the project by following the tag below. Free gelato for somewhere between one month and two months... depending on how long the budget lasts. Get it while you can.  

I am going to be talking about and reading from The Broken World as part of Sheffield's Off the Shelf festival on Sunday 19 Oct. Due to circumstances etc the event has moved from its original location at Bank Street Arts to the Showroom Cinema, in Showroom 5. The starting time will now be half an hour later than planned - at 8.30pm -  to allow time for  anyone that turns up at Bank Street enough time to get over to the Showroom. Advance tickets are from the Showroom on 0114 275 7727. 

I will also be reading soon in Berlin at the Hebbel Theatre on the night of Monday November 3rd. This time it's a reading from Endland - the German edition of my Endland Stories which also features a whole lot of new material including stories I wrote for Barbara Campbell's 1001 nights cast and for Kate McIntosh's solo performance Loose Promise. Endland has been translated by my good friend Astrid Sommer (as my occasional posts about it here already mentioned) and for the reading I will be joined by a great performer Thomas Wodianka (he's going to read the German versions, me some English ones). I first met Thomas working on Meg Stuart's project Alibi. I don't think I'll ever forget his fading, almost whispered version of a passage from David Wojnarowitz's amazing book Close to the Knives. Hebbel also shows my Manifesa 7 project Art Flavours as part of it's season Fressen Oder Fliegen – Art Into Theatre – Theatre Into Art. There will be something like 6-800 portions of Osvaldo Castellari's fabulous gelato (created for the project) going free in the season as well as screenings of my video work that documents the process.

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Forced Entertainment's Spectacular kicks off it's UK tour tomorrow at the Arts Centre in Warwick, full tour dates here. My piece for Victoria (now Campo) That Night Follows Day meanwhile is heading for the Melbourne Festival, with performances 22-25 October. 

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To celebrate all the above I will spend the whole day tomorrow locked in a hotel room in Coventry and working on my taxes. This hotel boasts of refurbishment by the way, but we all know that demolition is the only answer.

Heading to Belgium to rehearse with the new cast of kids for That Night Follows Day, just as the original cast start their long journey back from the Melbourne Festival.

New York Times on Drama Queens here. You may have to register but it's worth it to see the picture of the actors stood slightly awkwardly besides the motorised sculptures - some kind of almost-ironic postmodern re-run of a Futurist moment. In the event though, they did a pretty great job with the text.

Lyn Gardner, Lois Keidan, Helen Cole, Ant Hampton, Robert Pacitti and pretty much the entirety of the UK Live Art scene have a good old go at Ekow Eshun here for his comments on the relevance and vitality of the sector, and for his recent announcement about closing the ICA's Live And Media Arts department. Not that anyone really connects the ICA with performance these days but really - with a bit of imagination they could have an interesting program there with plenty of relevance and vitality. I guess private hires of the theatre space is too lucrative a cash cow.

My work City Changes (and Art Flavours) are in their last week at Manifesta 7, Rovereto. City Changes has, at the same time,  also just gone on show at PACT Zollverein in Essen.

Butchers - where my Wait Here neon resided back in the Summer months - now has a new show comprising Marcos Chaves' video Laughing Mask. Curated by Ben Borthwick and Cylena Simonds, Butchers also has a new website here.

Tim Etchells: Solo Exhibition. Gasworks. 5 February–28 March 2010

For Tim Etchells' first solo exhibition in a London public gallery, Gasworks presents two works previously unseen in the UK. Focusing on language and interpretation, the exhibition explores the potential of communication between discourses and cultural frames. Art Flavours (2008) reflects on the possibility and impossibility of translating the specialised language of the art world into edibles for the public. the video shows an italian ice cream master dealing with the task to translate concepts in contemporary art into flavours of ice cream. City Changes (2008) is a game of linguistic manipulation in which a single text is repeatedly reworked. Whilst playing with issues related to urban life such as change and stability, chaos and stasis, the work renders visible the process of writing itself, exposing the decisions, additions and omissions of each new incarnation. Opening: Thursday 4 February 2010.

The Story. The Conway Hall, London.Friday, February 19th, 2010

I'll be speaking at this event The Story, a one-day conference about stories and story-telling. The event has been put together by Matt Locke, a really interesting producer/curator/all rounder, who I worked with years back to produce my SMS instructions project Surrender Control. Speakers at The Story come from many and diverse areas of cultural practice - from games and interactive, to contemporary fiction and art, to publishing and journalism. Current list includes Cory Doctrow,  Tony White, Alexis Kennedy and Paul Arendt, David Hepworth and Sydney Padua. Full list here. Tickets info here.

Instructions: Gasworks Discussion Event: Wednesday 3 March 2010, 7–9pm

Tim Etchells in conversation with Ant Hampton.

Artist and writer Tim Etchells invites performer and writer Ant Hampton to Instructions - a discussion about delegation and collaboration across different fields of practice. The two practitioners will reflect on how theact of relinquishing control over the final outcome is embedded in their work and on their relationship to improvisation and incompleteness. Ant's blog here.