Re-table(au), performative installation, Design Museum Gent (BE) 2020
2020 was the year Ghent and Flanders were honouring the Flemish painter ‘Jan van Eyck’ and Tabulatopia was fortunate enough to be invited by The Design Museum in Ghent to create content for two experience rooms for their large scale ‘Kleureyck Exhibition’. In collaboration with the Jan van Eyck academie’s Food Lab, we developed a concept deeply rooted in the colourful landscapes of the ‘Ghent Altarpiece’ by Jan van Eyck. His unique use of colour was the genesis of our explorations as we set about devising a new piece which we named ‘Re-table(au)’.
The realistically depicted scene in this particular painting is an imaginary one, where locations and seasons are innovatively blended. This concept of imagined reality provoked thoughts amongst us relative to our current global food system in which the fiction of van Eyck’s depiction of exotic produce is now very much a non-fictitious reality where almost all edible produce (at least from the Ghent Altarpiece) is possible to source all year round regardless of its natural season.
Re-Table(au) is an endlessly evolving foodscape reminiscent of seasonality; where both established and fledgling exploration/preservation techniques and poetic rituals are presented in a tangible way. Activation moments occur throughout the exhibition in which the evolving tableau is shared physically and internally through a ritualistic experience of colour and flavour in a multi sensory environment including edible objects and other concoctions allowing you to literally digest the landscape.
http://www.designmuseumgent.be/
Photos © Design Museum Gent, Filip Dujardin
Tabulatopia 