To Whom It May Concern,

— round table for curiosities

A five-course dining experience exploring how food can, with its multi-sensorial features, be a tool to spark curiosity and a discursive device for generating conversations about matters of concern that affect society. The experience is visually black and white, provoking the perception of the visual and the content—there is not only one possible judgment, with consuming the food is changing its meaning. Project is predicted to happen among people with power who compromise the living beings and the environment, purely for their own economic and power growth within the structure built on inequality. Can they see below the surface of their acts with the food that is not what it appears to be?

Food is both nutritional and toxic, temporal in the consumption and permanent in the effect. Food creates experiences and evokes memories, it triggers our curiosity and plays with our perception. Food is going through many innovations but it is also huge part of the tradition. The food secrets stay in the darkness until someone brings them to light. Food gives us pleasure and anxiety. We risk a lot but we also find safety in it. We eat very distant ingredients while growing our own salad. All these binaries and dualities are part of our everyday relationship with food.

Process

To visualise some of the binaries in the form-giving process, I chose to explore glass & ice, temporality and permanence of its matter. They look quite alike visually, but are very different in their materiality. When served, they look the same, but after some time, one will stay as it is and other will perish. Glass plates were done in collaboration with glass artist Nina Westman.

Burnt walnut and ash wood plates and cutlery. Shapes of the tools and plates were created to complement the five dishes, with their function and estetic value.

Video teaser

Kitchen journal

I had an food advisor, a professional chef, who was digitally present throughout the process, giving advices and support for the dishes.

Food servings for the experience

Exhibitions

16-18 June, 2020 Konstfack OFF-SITE 2020, Lusthuset, Drottninggatan 116A, Stockholm, Sweden

3-27 September, 2020 SEART 2020, Storgatan 23C, Stockholm, Sweden

SEART 2020

For the opening of SEART 2020, I prepared 160 dots: 80 chocolate and 80 vegetarian panna cotta, served as two on 80 plates. Visually they were the same, but the texture and taste were not. After eating one, the other one came as a surprise.

It was served outside, as an amuse-bouche of my project, “To Whom It May Concern,” which is shown inside as an installation.

Table cloth was kindly provided by Astrid Textiles.