Valentine Desmoulins

Valentine Desmoulins is a chef.

Trained in France and Italy after an initial path in contemporary art in Paris, she develops a living cuisine in which taste, matter, and seasonality compose a sensitive language. From Ferrandi to restaurants in Paris and Milan, and later during a chef-in-residence period on the island of Stromboli, she has cultivated a particular attention to terroir and to the precise, harmonious transformation of ingredients: in her kitchen, nothing is thrown away, everything is transformed.

Her practice draws as much from her family heritage – two lineages in which cooking was a space of gathering, transmission, and storytelling – as from the years spent within Parisian cultural institutions.
She cooks as one sculpts: attentively, with the body, allowing rough edges to guide the gesture.

AtVilla Medici, she continues a culinary research practice oriented toward the future: how do we cook a terroir when climate change is reshaping it? How do we pass on recipes whose ingredients are shifting? How can a culture of taste in transformation be kept alive?
Her work lies at the intersection of memory and anticipation, tradition and transformation, everyday cooking and forward-looking research.

There, she develops Le Carnet romain des recettes de la fin du siècle (The Roman Notebook of End-of-the-Century Recipes), a project that examines the future of Italian cuisine in the age of climate change. Bringing together field research, encounters with producers, agronomists, and cooks, collaborations with researchers, and culinary creation, she imagines the recipes, gestures, and products of a transforming terroir. Both investigation and artwork, this notebook creates a dialogue between the memory of a cuisine and a vision of its future.