The different placement of the different solid elements arranged organically on the exhibition floor, which questions how solid the human body is, compared to the light emanating from the floor, while there is a musical intervention affects the viewer forcing you to live in "multiple states" at the same time.
Behind these elements, sheltered in a volume that refers to the original cabin as a laboratory, it shows a past-present connection, where the chef is half hidden by translucent fabrics, where the effects of fermentation are taking place.
Description of project by BUREAU
Originally released as part of the 5th Istanbul Design Biennial, Empathy Revisited: Designs for More Than One, MUSH ROOMS is a cooking performance by chef Walter El Nagar in front of a small public. Accompanied by a live musical experimentation by Filipe Felizardo, chef Walter performed cooking to work in and around decomposition and fermentation.
MUSH ROOMS is an attempt to acknowledge that we are multi-specifically connected, that what our body is less solid than we think, that the air that we breath is less unsubstantial than what we believe. And that we really exist by dwelling within these multiple states.
A large cooking table is the stage of the performance, specifically designed to constitute a landscape of living and inert materia of all kinds. The table, and thus the landscape oscillates between living, growing, decomposition and composition and our relation, as human spectators, to this otherness that we observe, contemplate and integrate into our body as a symbiotic act. In terms of design, the performance addresses indirectly the notion of reproduction and scale: how do we work with models and miniatures to “represent” imagined worlds, how solid are these representations and how could they be part of our living experience as much as static representations of something to become?
