The kitchen as the stage for life.
"The Farm Project" by Mike Meiré at Designhuis, Eindhoven
Eindhoven, September 2009
Dornbracht presented "The Farm Project" by Mike Meiré for the first time at the Milan Furniture Fair in April 2006. Due to its great success, the installation was presented during the Passagen 2007 exhibitions in Cologne, as an associate project at the opening days of the münster 07 sculpture projects and at the ART Basel Miami Beach exhibition in December 2007. Li Edelkoort, the internationally renowned trend researcher and curator of various design projects, selected "The FARM Project" for her current exhibition "Farmer in Search of Style".
The installation, which was developed for the Dornbracht Edges exhibition series, will be on display from 6th to 27th September, 2009 at the Designhuis in Eindhoven.
"'The Farm Project' is not a decorative idea, but rather an attitude, an appeal for the alternative", says Mike Meiré. "The desire to design everything over the last few years has resulted in us doing without many interesting, beautiful, enchanting things, especially in the kitchen. I think that's a shame, because the kitchen in particular has always been a place full of life and tolerance." With his installation, Mike Meiré presents the kitchen as being life's stage: the lively jumble of scents, ingredients and spices, of cutlery, crockery, pots and pans. The kitchen as a place of tolerance, in which food and drink, kitchen utensils and recipes from all over the whole world co-exist along side and with one another. A space of the most varied artistic, architectural and cultural encounters.
Thus, the project is defined neither by technical finesse nor formal perfection. But rather the visitors find themselves to be guests in a kitchen depicting down-to-earth, simple life: In a barn-like room the visitor is confronted with live pigs, birds, fish; hay, pitchforks and simple galvanized tin buckets create a symbolic ensemble; a cast iron oven provides warmth; a two-level sink made of stainless steel becomes a sculpture. Simple crockery is stacked up, as if by accident, in various piles. A dishwashing unit on wheels rounds off the picture.
Panels of various materials – copper sheets, insulation board, plastic – form the exterior of the shell of the room, made of greyish white steel beams: the barn becomes an improvised meta-symbol. The diverse shades, consistencies and surface structures merge into one emblematic, makeshift patchwork. In their variety, they also represent our civilisation. And they form a delicate skin. Looking at this exterior fragility and supposed chaos of the patchwork makes the inside seem like a safe haven. It becomes a place of longing.
"The stimulus for the conception of 'The Farm Project' was the question as to how the ritual architecture concepts that we have developed in collaboration with Dornbracht for the bathroom could be transferred to the kitchen space", says Mike Meiré. "I have been noticing a tendency towards the archaic in design for a long time,a tendency which is accompanied by minimalism. People want to create icons: precise, graphic shapes that are memorable. But we have to make a distinction: Where does this type of minimalisation make sense? The kitchen is indeed a highly complex place, a constant "making of", pure life itself almost, a workshop for the senses. And that is exactly the message I want to convey to people who enter my "kitchen-barn".
"The FARM Project" catalogue comprises 240 pages with contributions from various authors on the subject of the kitchen with historical, architectural, theoretical design and artistic aspects. The catalogue is available in German or English from the Buchhandlung Walther König Publishing House.
