Marije Vogelzang, a Dutch eating designer, visiting the Lampa Hall in Helsinki, Finland on April 19 2016. Picture: Tony Öhberg for Finland Today
“It could be said that I am a designer of shit . . . ,” proudly exclaimed Marije Vogelzang at her Food Camp Finland press luncheon on this past Tuesday.
Vogelzang of course is more than just a fecal-planner extraordinaire, she is the world’s first eating designer and the founder of The Dutch Institute of Food and Design. And what is an eating designer you might ask?
Vogelzang has amassed an impressive body of work that answers just that. From an all-white funerary meal to creating new species of animals for human consumption to having strangers feed each other, Vogelzang strips away our growing obsession with the preparation of food and gets to its soul; the simple act of eating and how that nourishes the human spirit. Her most poignant works focus on food as a harbinger of memories that heal both new and old.
Vogelzang’s “Food Memory Workshop,” reunited Dutch elders with the foods of their childhood, conjuring up a wealth of stories and emotions about life around the time of the Second World War. “Eat Love Budapest” brought together two cultures that often clash; that of the Westernized European and the Roma people. Vogelzang used the humble act of Roma women physically feeding Hungarian women both food and memories attached to the consumables.
To Helsinki Design Week (1-11.9), Vogelzang brings her unique brand of “je ne sais quoi” to the Lampa House with the dining experience “A Couple of Little Things,” an evening built around the concept of displacement.
In this case it will be based on Pekka Paikkari’s immense and fractal ceramic masterpiece addressing the experience of the 80,000 Finnish children Sweden took in during the Second World War. Vogelzang was vague as to how the event will take shape but it is certainly one not to be missed!
A Couple of Little Things
Lampa House, Helenankatu 2, Helsinki
6.–8.9.2016 at 20, 21 ja 22 (duration 50 min)
