One Day with Sophie de Mello Franco

ONE DAY WITH | HAPPENINGS | WORLD OF CABANA

French-Brazilian curator and advisor Sophie de Mello Franco is the founder of ORFEO0112, a curatorial project designed to instigate conversation through new exhibition formats. Her upcoming project, Table Manners, does just that: blurring the boundaries between a restaurant and an exhibition space. Speaking to Sophie Goodwin as she prepares Table Manners at Halo Paris taking place during Art Basel Paris, she reflects on the choreographies of dining, fair week in Paris, and shares her not-to-be-missed exhibitions.

BY SOPHIE GOODWIN |  HAPPENINGS | 22 OCTOBER 2026

Sophie de Mello Franco photographed at Halo Paris.

It is the Sunday before Art Basel Paris, and at Halo Paris, on Rue Saint-Sauveur, the kitchen and front of house staff are being briefed by artist, Adam Harrison, and chef, Dom Lee. Works are being prepared and installed across the space ahead of Tuesday’s opening to the public. 

In the city’s cultural calendar, few weeks carry as much weight as this; Art Basel Paris, one of Europe’s most anticipated art fairs opens at the Grand Palais, while museums and institutions unveil their major exhibitions of the season. For the art world, this is Paris’s rentrée (back to school), the moment everything begins again.

Between making new works with the artists on site, unpacking and hanging artworks, rehearsing with the kitchen staff and setting the last tables, Sophie takes us behind the scenes as the exhibition takes shape.

This week is a little outside the ordinary. I don’t have the leisure time to take a slow morning or exercise before starting the day. I make a Hojicha at home and grab it on the go, heading to the restaurant Halo on 12 Rue Saint Sauveur to meet with the kitchen staff and the artists participating in the exhibition.

Chef Dom Lee has come from Houston Texas. There he runs a fine dining restaurant, Augustine’s. This week he will be a guest chef at Halo Paris alongside the resident chef, Baptiste Trudel, to make the 'Dinner Games' come to life.

This idea has been in the making for some time. I have had multiple conversation with Canadian artist, Adam Harrison, and chef, Dom Lee, about creating a project that bridges both of their practices but that addresses the cultural meaning of dining out. The project took its final shape when the owners of Halo offered us their space to go crazy with during Basel Week. We took the chance and ran with it. 

Dinner Games will be a unique dining experience. It's part of the show, Table Manners, where visitors are invited to participate in a performative piece, a game conceived by Adam Harrison and Chef Dom Lee. In his work, Harrison is interested in bringing back play into everyday life. He sees games as a set of tools for learning and seeing the world through a creative and expansive framework.

Adults, most often than not, forget how to play. Therefore they lose the habit of using this set of tools that inevitably have the ability to expand their worldview. In Dinner Games, each course will unfold into a game, spurring conversations and inviting new forms of collaboration and creativity.

Alongside Dinner Games, Adam Harrison is creating a new body of work, the Recipe Paintings. Each canvas is made using a different cooking technique, such as grilling, pickling or braising. Today we are making the Brûléed Painting: sugar is poured onto the surface of the canvas, then caramelised with a torch like a crème brûlée. For safety reasons, we decide to work outside, on the streets of the Marais.

It is, of course, a very unusual day, as protests are taking place across Paris. Crowds on the sidelines of the demonstrations stop to watch the artwork in the making. The moment feels particularly powerful given its context: while fires burn elsewhere in the city, we are making a different kind of proposition, one that challenges convention through art, here by cooking the surface of a painting.

In the afternoon, I take a quick visit to the Bourse de Commerce. I go to see their photography show Remember-Me. In the rotunda is a mind blowing installation by Barbara Kruger, which lends its title to the entire show celebrating 200 years of photography. Later this week I will visit Jenny Holzer’s exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay. It’s interesting to see two major conceptual artists, who are foundational figures of feminist art from the 80’s and 90’s, leading the program of institutions this year.

Back at Halo, the kitchen preparations are in full speed. Baptiste Trudel, the resident chef, is working with his team and Chef Dom Lee on the mise en place for Dinner Games, an interactive, performative artwork served as a meal at lunch and dinner throughout the week. They are preparing seasonal vegetable dishes for the starter course, Dinner Roll, in which each diner rolls a die that determines which dish lands on their plate. Meanwhile, Adam Harrison is setting the tables with the elements that make up Dinner Games. Each guest gets a die, a pen and a card from the Minute Games, with instructions to follow for one minute.

Table Manners includes the work of two more artists: Allan Weber and Cory Arcangel. Allan Weber has just arrived in Paris from his native Rio de Janeiro. In the exhibition, we’ve included works from a series of photographs he took while working as a delivery driver in Rio de Janeiro. Allan will also be presenting a solo exhibition in Paris in November during Paris Photo at Au Passage. He arrived early to prepare works for that show and to participate in Table Manners.

Pizza Party (2004), by Cory Arcangel and Michael Frumin, is a command-line program for ordering Domino’s pizza, a once-dystopian idea of code summoning a human errand. Today, with delivery apps ubiquitous and invisible, it reads as a relic of the early web, and perhaps a prophecy that came true. The code is presented as a zine, alongside a video in which the artists explain how and why they made it.

On my way home, I stop at the Louvre for the Zurbarán exhibition. On the eve of the art fairs, there’s something grounding about spending an hour with the old masters before diving into what’s new. I’m stopped in my tracks by Zurbarán’s The Immaculate Conception with Two Boys Praying (1632), where the Virgin is suspended in a golden light by a globe held by cherubs. Before leaving, I make a usual detour to look at Braque’s ceiling, with birds flying across the blue Salle Henri II. Another reminder that great art transcends its own time.

There are several other gallery exhibitions I’m especially looking forward to. These include After Use at Theorème Editions, showing work by Brazilian artist Zé Tepedino, who assembles sculptures from the found materials that make up the urban landscape of Rio; Talia Chetrit at Tramps, whose photographs probe desire, power and the act of looking; and Ici la Mer, the inaugural exhibition at LXVIII RUE DES ARCHIVES, a new project space in the Marais. 

- - - - - - - - - -

The exhibition Table Manners is on view from 20th to 24th of October from 11:30 am to 2am.

Tables can be booked to have lunch or dinner for Dinner Games at Halo from 20th to 24th of October.

 https://www.halo-paris.com/reservation