Year
2015
Tag
Installations
What is left after a meal can seem like a small, private remainder. Its size makes it easy to separate from everything that brought it to the table: production, transport, purchase, preparation and the decisions about what to keep.
For BASF’s Creator Space Tour, we developed a connected sequence of three installations about food waste. Presented at Disseny Hub Barcelona during the company’s 150th-anniversary programme, the works brought everyday choices into a public setting where their wider consequences could be considered together.
2015 · BASF Creator Space Tour · Disseny Hub Barcelona · Art & Research / Installations.
The original project film by Aleix Castells, published in December 2015. Playback verified on Vimeo.
Beginning with everyday habits
One part of the installation invited people to connect answers with string. Each contribution made a route through the questions, while many routes produced a shared surface. A familiar action—answering a question about daily life—became visible beside other people’s answers.
The resulting pattern offered a point of entry into a subject often introduced through large totals. It began with the people in the room and the habits they could recognise, before asking how those habits belonged to a larger system.
A participant contributes to the installation’s string-based display.
Answer labels and string anchors in detail.
Three ways of approaching a question
The work unfolded as a sequence. Alongside the participatory strings were an enclosed accumulation of material and a graphic display organised around the consumer. Each part offered a different way of approaching the relationship between everyday choices and their consequences.
Their relationship gave the subject duration. Visitors could move from contributing an answer to examining a representation, and from an individual action to a question about its consequences. The three installations offered different distances from the same everyday problem.
Material elements inside the exhibition display.
An illuminated graphic display within the three-part installation.
Making the remainder visible
Food waste is easy to encounter as an instruction to behave better. This project sought a setting in which the connection between behaviour and consequence could be examined. Questions and material displays made that connection available for conversation.
The sequence gave an ordinary remainder enough space and attention to be considered as part of a shared world. What appeared small at the end of a meal could be followed back through the habits and systems that had produced it.
How it was made
Three linked installations combined participatory string-based visualisation, a material display and graphic interpretation. They were arranged as a sequence within Disseny Hub.
Explanatory reconstruction based on the project archive. The drawing shows the installation and visitor interaction; it is not a fabrication plan.
References
- Original DDS case study — Original project description and photographic record.
A project by Domestic Data Streamers. Images selected from the original project and exhibition archives.
