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-même, 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.
debra at 23:24 | Comments (1) | post to del.icio.us
Gastarbeider Dating,
the Hungry Man’s
recipe 4 luv
February 6, 2008
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Suggestive profiling image from Mediamatic’s Gastarbeider Dating Site (now in beta!) and used entirely without permission
Because 2008 is about solving all of life’s little problems, one of my New Year’s slash Tu Bishvat resolutions was to start dating. Now I always like to throw in a little bit of achievability with the lofty and ambitious resolutions, and although dating is proving to be a smidgeon more difficult than improving one’s handwriting (and 81 times more time consuming), it is no less satisfying.
So when Mediamatic, one of Amsterdam’s best cultural platforms announced that they would start a dating site for people in the arts, media and design, it seemed like a more aesthetic solution for me than duking it out on J-Date.
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Blog author’s kimchi butterflies in her stomach
Here’s the Mediamatic dating site blurb:
A liberal use of the F-word in my profile, (now removed to preserve some anonymity) landed me a few gents willing to talk about food and food culture in our initial dating correspondence. I was betting on food’s broad metaphoric value to get things revved up, but now I’m thinking that us art and design types should cut to the chase when sniffing each other’s butts.
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Suggestive profiling image from Mediamatic’s Gastarbeider Dating Site (now in beta!) and used entirely without permission
The dating site is an art piece by Mediamatic, but it’s very real indeed. Ten days on and the dating pool is thankfully growing, so that it doesn’t get more incestuous in this town than it already is. Single alpha males above and beyond the age of… 35 (!) will not be disappointed with the throngs of super fab cultural sector ex-patriettes that grace the Gastarbeider Dating site. Please feel welcome and invite your brethren. (Maybe a good idea to ask them to invite their brethren as well.) Plus it would be very helpful if some of the more festive gays would come over and show the hetero art & design nerds how to yuck it up a little.
Here’s an original recipe that I got from Bachelor #1 (not his real name). Looks yummy, so I edited it a bit and thought I’d publish it entirely without his permission. Is this a hot recipe?
- Pumpkin and smoked mackerel salad with orange
1 smoked mackerel (in the NL they call these steamed, but they are most definitely smoked)
1 orange, preferably a blood orange
1 orange pumpkin, the size of a 2 yr. old child’s head
2 tbs roasted almonds
goodly drizzle of olive oil
goodly pinch of the following: sea salt, freshly ground pepper and cumin seed
Preheat the oven to 190° c (~375 F)
While the oven is still heating up, roast the almonds in an oven dish, they don’t mind the fluctuation.
Place thinly sliced pieces of pumpkin on an oven tray, drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle with salt. Roast in a medium hot oven until soft. It will start to smell sweet when it’s almost ready, so focus pocus.
Whilst the almonds are toasting and the pumpkin is roasting, skin and debone the mackerel with all the care in the world. No one likes fishing through their mouth for obstacles. Feel around the ‘seams’ of the filets that there aren’t rows of bones hiding. Separate into obvious chunks and set aside.
The almonds are probably done by now. Remove them from the oven and on a wooden cutting board, crush them sloppily with the flat end of your vegetable knife. Set aside.
Filet the orange into sections thusly: do not peel it with your hands, instead cut off the skin leaving no trace of white pith. If you’re worried about wasting food, you can candy this peel and use it for something else. But the white part of an orange just doesn’t belong in this recipe, so cut liberally.
When the orange is a naked ball, hold in your helper hand and cut along the section membrane towards the centre. Stop just before you get there and go around the other side of the section membrane back ‘out’ again to release the section. This is a technique to get nicely shaped and juicy pieces of orange for salads.
By this time the pumpkin is probably ready, test with a fork, to see if it’s perfect. Just out of the oven, dust it with the black pepper and the cumin seeds which on the warm pumpkin will release their aromas nicely.
When the pumpkin is more or less room temperature, toss it into a large bowl with some more olive oil. Try to not break it up too much. Add the chunks of mackerel and the orange slices and ‘tussle’ more than toss, to not break up any of the ingredients. Heterogeneïty is better in this case than homogeneïty. Sprinkle with the crushed almonds and if you want, a last dusting of the salt, pepper and cumin seed.
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Bone marrow
January 30, 2008
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Roasted cow bone right out of the oven.
Maybe it’s because I was sick with flu for the past 2 months and had no appetite. Maybe because bone marrow used to be considered a restorative food for ill people. Maybe because yesterday, going to and from yoga practice, I just wore 2 pairs of sweats under my pants. Maybe because my friend Marlein gave me that great cookbook with a yummy bone marrow recipe, Nose to Tail Eating by Fergus Henderson. Maybe because I’ve got carnivorous house guests.
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This picture represents a perfect food pyramid for omnivores with a healthy mixture of green, purple, alive and dead.
Whatever the reason, I was so happy to be hungry again and bone marrow was on my mind. Why these buttery goodness sticks aren’t roasted and sold on every single street corner as the most delicious snack you can spoon onto toast, sprinkle with salt flakes and pop into your mouth is a mystery to me. I mean, if most of the year you eat like a hippy vegetarian, a little bone marrow every now and again will only produce a state of bliss. Plus it’s nice to eat more than just animal T&A.
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