Melbourne Design Week 2019 - Presented by The National Gallery of Victoria
But First We Eat - Exhibition and Dinners, March 15 – April 4th, 2019
In 2019 I co-curated an exhibition with Jia Jia Chen for The National Gallery of Victoria’s Melbourne Design Week.
2019’s prompt was How can design shape the future? With most participants coming from architecture, industrial design and academia, the festival has an emerging technology focus. In this context, they wanted to offer a counterpoint to technology and question it’s effects on human experience, most notably the increased reporting on social disconnection and loneliness. Their exhibition, But First We Eat brought 160 random guests together over 7 nights and placed them in an immersive space to experience an ancient ritual of communal dining, sharing and community building.
The dinners showcased the ancient technique of baking food encased in clay in a gallery converted into a dining room, featuring the tableware, lighting and furniture of six contemporary designers. All of the food was wrapped in clay and cooked with fire, guests used handmade brass tools to break open the ceramic exterior to reveal an edible interior, which remained a mystery until this act of destruction.
By bringing guests back to basics and creating a temporary social group that had to share and experience a different form of eating, the show created a relational social experience which became an entity in it’s own right.
The National Gallery of Victoria’s listing:
www.ngv.vic.gov.au/program/but-first-we-eat/
Our event website:
www.butfirstweeat.net/
