A weekend from sugar rushes
February 20, 2008
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Sugar graffiti from Shane Waltener’s Cooking and Constructing workshop last Sunday at Amsterdam’s Platform21.
Growing up, my family referred to sugar as White Death. Consequently I don’t have much of a sweet tooth and I really prefer pickles or anything fermented to sweets. But in a period of my life when I was doing a lot of cycling I discovered that sugar could also be a drug, and therefore something to play with. You eat some sugar, get totally high on a fabulous rush of energy, come crashing down and want to take a nap, eat some more sugar and get high again. Crash. Repeat. In the past weeks dating was starting to take on some of the characteristics of recreational sugar use, offering highs and hyperactivity, exhaustion looming behind every rush.
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Sugar, the writing is on the wall. Waltener’s edible graffiti, Cooking and Constructing at Platform21
Barely a few weeks into it and the Mediamatic Gastarbeider Dating site had to create new data structures to accommodate the flow of my datemail. My Gayfriends, having inspired me to date in the first place, were perpetually rolling their eyes complaining how much they suffered from my generalizing questions about male psychology and my rudimentary knowledge of courtship. (Sorry Gays, I’m not worthy.) Worst of all, I was becoming crazy from the breathless intensity of my own communication, the high level of attention from the heteros, (to which I am truly not accustomed) and all the excitement and fuss. My work was suffering, my yoga teacher was getting annoyed, it was time to stop dating.
After Saturday.
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Pictured below and not above is the grand dessert produced by Saturday’s Date (not his real name), a man who understands the benefit of the slow and steady burn, someone who naturally sort of gets me. I don’t know what will come of it, but this guy… he smells like posse and he can actually compose a meal.
To be continued…
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Grand dessert: espresso, artisanal goat milk dulce de leche with (not pictured) baklava array and home made hash cookie.
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Homegrown
February 15, 2008
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Sprouted sunflower seeds in the dead of winter
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Cooking and constructing,
food as a real design platform
February 12, 2008
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Vegetable ink production and ‘pantonization’ by Daniera ter Haar and Christoph Brach
Platform 21’s Cooking and Constructing is food as a real design platform, in a real design platform. There is reason to applaud this very real design laboratory which will be open for the coming 8 weeks. The work setting designed by Frank Visser, consists of colourful food scenario objects, kitchen pieces, caravans and lab tables, beautiful context sculptures that serve as platforms for the experimental food-related research taking place in and around them. A well composed network of designers will be participating in the Cooking and Construction programming, chosen I suspect for the inevitability of their collaboration. Each Sunday will spotlight a new set of design research, all of it food-related in the broadest sense of the word.
It’s something of a fashion these days for curators of art and design platforms to call their exhibits laboratoria. Everyone says it, but nobody really does it, for a number of existentially vain and practical reasons. Because failure is an inevitable part of true experimentation, because real experiments are not necessarily coherent, accessible or beautiful in the eyes of the beholders. Because artists, designers & curators are not infrequently massive star-fuqrs who find it hard to get down to the business of experimentation with telepathic meddlers looking over our shoulders. And because it’s always been something of a secret how much time we actually waste in producing all that cool shtuff. Let alone the extraneous and not-so-cool… The Cooking and Construction show is about who shows to produce the research and experimentation.
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Beet juice ink installation by Daniera ter Haar and Christoph Brach. Any resemblance of the beet drips on the floor to a map of the United States of America is entirely coincidental.
The lineup of artists, designers and architects includes, Daniera ter Haar & Christoph Brach, who are developing a Pantone array of vegetable inks, Shane Waltener who will be researching the possibilities of sugarcraft graffiti, landscape architects van Bergen Kolpa who will be designing the Dutch culinary landscape and 2012 Architects that will be super-using every and all materials. There’s also me-moi-mĂŞme, who will be summing up my research on gluten with a wheat meat design workshop on March 30th, and who also has ambitious plans to use the open nature of the facility to become a potato plastic adept, working closely with the other designers and architects, just as Platform 21’s creative producer Arne Hendriks and creative director Joanna van der Zande have intended.
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Designers Daniera ter Haar and Christoph Brach in one of the exhibition test kitchens designed by Frank Visser
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Foods translated to the landscape it takes to grow them by van Bergen Kolpa Architects in a Frank Visser caravan. Flow Food is a spatial-culinary view of the future of the Dutch landscape in the year 2070 and will be presented March 23rd.
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Culiblog author showing her first potato plastic bowl that ultimately needed to be held together by a friend. Upside is it has a tail.
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Cooking and Constructing, Platform 21
February 10- March 30 2008, Amsterdam
Every Sunday, there’s Sunday Soup, with workshops, lectures, presentations and films.
17 February: Cover our walls in edible tags of sugar graffiti, which you make during a workshop with artist Shane Waltener. With snacks and bubblegum alley.
24 February: The natural Pantone-fan, from beet root purple to mango yellow. Results of a research into natural colours and a workshop by designers Christoph Brach and Daniera ter Haar.
2 March: Food Cinema, building spaghetti bridges and making carrot flutes. Plus give your own demonstration in the open kitchen. What do you make?
9 March: New uses for the potato stamp. Results of a week long experimenting by the TXT Department of the Rietveld Academy.
16 March: Using grain and corn as bio-fuel or food? What do you choose: ‘Food or Fuel’? With film screenings and making lemon batteries.
23 March: What effect do your eating habits have on your environment? With the results of the project ‘Toko NL - culinary planning’ of landscape architects van Bergen Kolpa, a lecture by 2012 Architects and new visions on the market place by Maurice Nio.
30 March: The future of ‘breed meat’: with an elucidation by Cor van der Weele, workshop ‘design your own meat’ by Debra Solomon and a contribution from the Arts & Genomics Centre.
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