The Cube

 “The aim is to create an experience that surprises and inspires with fantastic tastes, gastronomic hints and tips from some of the world’s greatest chefs and never-before-seen views, ultimately stimulating guests to explore their own creative boundaries next time they entertain friends or family at home.”

Electrolux has created a restaurant that travels to different locations and lands on different buildings and landmarks. At each location, local chefs will cook traditional and local recipes using ingredients from their own country. It is a traveling kitchen  that adapts to different cultures and cuisines. The chef and his cooking will be on display for the guests to see & interact with the maker of the recipes. When the food is done and ready to be served the dinning table will drop from the ceiling to seat the guests.

Ai Weiwei: Can Art Alter Society ?

“If you don’t Speak your mind, then who are you”    Ai weiwei

Ai Weiwei is a chinese artist known for his continuous criticism and provocation of the chinese government. He was detained yesterday and most of his work was confiscated. He had several clashes with the government if not personally at least on the world-wide web. His blog was always under watch and continually firewalled. You might remember his Tate Modern’s Sun flower installation where he covered the whole ground with hand crafted porcelain sun flower seeds. Each Seed was individually painted  by the town that once made porcelain for the imperial court. Whats absurd about the story is that the town was saved  from bankruptcy by making those seeds. The purpose of the installation was to explore the “made in china” phenomenon and the mass production exports coming out from china. Each seed represents a work of art, represents a person’s source of living and yet the whole picture blurs this fact as it does in the real life exports from china. We fail to see the hands behind all those mass productions. The work also questions the place of art in the chinese society; how a town that was once famous for its porcelain works ended up  making thousands of seeds if not millions to save itself from poverty. The effects of the world trade on the chinese culture.

Photo Courtesy of the Tate Modern Museum

Also another interesting project was the “Study in Perspective” series from 1995 to 2003 where he captured his middle finger in front of political buildings in Beijing, Berlin, Paris, Washington DC and Hong Kong.

Photo Courtesy of Ai Weiwei

“Map of China” 2003 is another controversial work where he assembled a 50 cm tall extrusion of the map of china from the salvaged wood of the demolished Qing dynasty temples. The “map” was assembled without one single nail through a traditional method of jointing.

An interseting Documentray made by Alison Klayman: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/ai-wei-wei/ai-weiwei-story/

SIT by Matthias Pliessnig

Made of  steam bent oak, the structures were inspired by the human form and  its relation with space. Those wave-like seats sit in space and create a continueous flow that connects different bodies together.

Jugaad- Public Art Installation, India



“What happens when a thousand oil cans decide to fly?

Jugaad explored this idea through a celebratory and constantly evolving process of re-purposing and redefining the cooking oil can, a ubiquitous feature of Indian life. The project borrows its namefrom a hindi term which refers to attaining any objective with the available resources at hand. Bycombining this attitude with an open-source, inclusive process, the project took recycling and reuse beyond a simple utilitarian measure into an exciting adventure of defiance and collective will. This journey is the result of a unique engagement with the residents of Rajokri, an urban village on the outskirts of New Delhi in India. Over a period of three months, Sanjeev Shankar used the discarded oil can as a vehicle to explore ideas of sustainability, recycling and re-purposing with 90 other residents from the village. Using grass root ingenuity, Jugaad reincarnated 945 such cans into an incredible free-standing shade canopy spread over 70 square metres. This story celebrates the practice of jugaad and the collective spirit of India and its people.”

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                sanjeev shankar