Electric Sense: Edible scape
Part of a group exhibition ‘Where the grass smells blue’
Reflection on the past of Draka cable factory in Amsterdam, NL
In a place where the grass smells blue, attention is centered around nature: first as the object that we are aware of, through both smell and color—secondly as a means to stimulate our perception of reality through an obstruction it creates, between what we understand of the world we perceive, and how we do so—and thirdly as a presence ‘different’ from our making that, over time, takes over the abandoned place. The focus on nature is not to reconstruct or imitate it as something we might already recognize, but on the experience of nature as something that vibrates. In the words of Isabelle Strengers, “as soon as we state ‘what’ we perceive, a transition occurs to which nature cannot account (...) sense-objects, as soon as they are defined as “what” we perceive...apart from the passage of nature, are abstractions.” The question here is surely not ‘what’.
Art exhibition in former DRAKA factory
10/7 - 17/7, 14.00-22.00
2 Hamerstraat, 1021 JV Amsterdam
This group exhibition showcases work by Alma van de Burgwal, Anne van de Ven, Delphine Lejeune, Marah Wagner, and Panita S, and touches upon different disciplines ranging from architecture and graphic design to edible art. Each contribution takes inspiration from a natural phenomenon and aims to capture particular organic qualities within an inorganic material. Collectively the works shed light upon details of their environment which are often overlooked.
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Electric Sense is as much an exercise conduit to looking back and building upon the memory of a space that people might have forgotten, as spatial and cultural research into the experience of being here back in the day in the former cable and wire factory. An edible installation presents various combinations of flavors and tastes-pairing is presented as an interpretation through Panita’s sense as a way to reflect on this location and the people that inhabited it in the everyday. As eating is natural by itself, the installation allows us to insert ourselves within a multisensorial landscape and its temporal finitude, from which we can take perspective on the past and present of the context presented by the edible elements. Through an interplay of what is or was local (or foreign) to space, it tells a rich story through the edible materials that engage with the many (usually migrant) workers that used to be in the location. Some of the numbing sensations in the experience testify to the mesh of the senses as a metaphor, that reflects the tension between the space, the archive, and lived experience while reflecting on the ingestion of our lived, constructed, and resilient environments.
Visual Identity by Delphine Lejeune
Text by Esteban Gomez Roselli
