A Bacterial Banquet
The Decorators Kimchi-Pool, Portal Tables (2021) activated by participants of the Kimjang Project, led by Justina Jang, festival director of the Kingston Korea Festival (image: Sergio Márquez & The Decorators).
“We always work with food; there always seems to be a table involved,” explains Xavi Llarch Font, one fourth of the interdisciplinary design collective The Decorators. “This was an opportunity to take those two elements and really research them.”
In the darkened exhibition space of the Stanley Picker Gallery, Kingston University, the fruits of that research have taken strange form as an exhibition, Portal Tables. In the centre of the space is Kimchi-Pool: a table, but not as we know it. A clear, inflatable tabletop is perched atop a black base, from which air-filled nodules spread out like pseudopodia from a grasping amoeba. The table can seat 12 – variously kneeling, sat, or leant against its protuberances – and has been designed to support the communal making of kimchi, the fermented vegetable dish that is a staple of Korean cuisine. Nearby, a film shows Kimchi-Pool in action, a group of volunteers from the local Kingston Korea Festival (the borough is home to the largest Korean community in Europe) participating in the annual kimjang preparation process. Spread around its inflatable surface, the team set to work, mixing radish, cabbage and seasonings before packing it in jars to ferment.
Kimchi-Pool installed in the Stanley Picker Gallery, Kingston University (image: Ellie Laycock).
Within the video, at least two kinds of connection are at play. There are the social and cultural ties between people, shared through the traditional kimjang process, but The Decorators also wish to draw attention to the relationship between people and microbes – without which, there would be no kimchi. “We’ve always looked at this idea of community, and how we can expand community,” notes Mariana Pestana, who co-founded the Decorators with Llarch Front and their colleagues Suzanne O’Connell and Carolina Caicedo. With Kimchi-Pool, that notion of community has been extended into the microbial world. “It became fascinating to think about how practices of fermentation are so grounded in specific cultures and communities, and how those practices forced us to reconsider what we mean by ‘community’,” notes Pestana. What happens, the collective asks, when we start to look beyond the purely human scale and consider the different forms of life and activity that are entangled with our own? “Looking inside the body, we began considering other bodies that partake in these same encounters [with food],” says Pestana. “What does it mean to discuss commensality with these micro organisms?”
Cheese-Board, Portal Tables (2021) activated by Inês Neto dos Santos (image: Sergio Márquez & The Decorators).
Alongside Kimchi-Pool, the collective designed two further inflatables. Cheese-Board is a small surface created to support the creation of labneh, with a tap-like structure from which to hang yoghurt to drain the whey, while Sofa-Bread is a blow-up landscape intended for lounging, into which two ceramic bowls have been sunk to allow for bread dough to prove. The inflatables make for unusual, ambiguous objects (although they are not without precedent – kimchi pools are real things), whose form suits the subject matter of the project. “They're quite amorphous shapes,” agrees Llarch Front. “They've ended up quite ‘bacterial’, if you like.” The use of inflatables also ties the project into the history of design and architecture, with these forms having been adopted in the 1960s and 70s by experimental practices such as Hans-Rucker-Co. for projects that proposed new modes of living. “There's this resonance with 1960s utopian architecture movements and their connection to inflatables that we thought was interesting to bring back into the now,” notes Pestana.”We wanted to problematise that with that question of commensality.”
Alongside their inflatable objects, the studio chose to display the anthropologist Susanne Kerner’s diagram of commensality, which uses concentric rings to demonstrate different levels of food sharing: from in-utero feeding of the foetus by the mother, through to multi-person banquets. Yet the studio has also three-dimensionalised Kerner’s drawing, creating a version in which the rings pull down into a wormhole. Within this second diagram, the rings plunge deep into the microbial world, exploring commensality between humans and non-humans: microbes both in the external world and also within the human gut. What is fermented food if not humans and microbes dining on the same spread?
Sofa-Bread, Portal Tables (2021) activated with Resting (2021) by Laura Wilson, performed by Elina Akhmetova and Piedad Seiquer, with costumes by Lucie Kordacova (image: Sergio Márquez & The Decorators).
The project was begun before the pandemic, but the extra time and space afforded by lockdown – as well as the manner in which Covid shifted perceptions around microbes: both in terms of pathogens, but also as enablers of leisure activities such as bread making – allowed it to rapidly grow in scope. In a film produced in conjunction with Sergio Márquez, Stephen McLaughlin, and Maxwell Sterling, The Decorators explore some of the questions that arose as part of their research into microbes. “It is urgent today to acknowledge solidarity with other humans, but also non-humans,” intones the voiceover. “Take a moment to notice the many non-human entities that form your body, that populate your food, and cohabit your home and street. Consider what can be learned from these cultures and communities.” The film goes on to share scientific research into the role that bacteria play in human digestion, as well as the idea that they release Dopamine and Serotonin into the body, triggering happiness in the same fashion as “IRL human interaction”.
“We had a lot of conversations about how tricky the term ‘communities’ is, and who is part of our community and how do we generate community?” says Llarch Front. “We took that as a challenge to interrogate the word itself.”
Sofa-Bread in the gallery, accompanied by an adapted version of Susanne Kerner’s diagram of commensality (image: Ellie Laycock).
“We had to conduct our research differently to how we normally would,” adds Pestana, noting the impossibility of the face-to-face interaction that typically forms the cornerstone of The Decorators work. “Instead, we did more research by reading and connecting different strands of knowledge together.” The result is a project that delights in its open-endedness, and which will invite different perspectives from everyone who views it. “We're not trying to present a finished idea,” says Llarch Front, who acknowledges the benefits of the video format in drawing together and representing the studio's diverse research throughout the pandemic period. “This is an amalgamation of all the thoughts that were happening at that moment in time.”