Written by Buse Özcan
Project: "Haz" - Hazal Kırıkçı
Ters-Yüz: Re-thinking the potentials was realised at the santralistanbul campus on 28 May – 16 August 2019. The exhibition, which featured the senior design projects of Department of Industrial Design students at Istanbul Bilgi University, invited designers and users to reconsider the relationships they form in a social, cultural, and economic context. Six students who took the course titled IND 324 Design Writing and Editorship wrote about six projects from the exhibition.
The relationship between the pieces and projects coincides with one of the aims of the Istanbul Design Biennial, which is forming a space of constant learning and reflection. In order to encourage young people to reflect upon issues that revolve around design, the IDB will be publishing these six pieces every week.
Next up is “M-o-mento” by Buse Özcan.
I woke up early in the morning with sad news. I’ll be leaving for my grandfather’s funeral shortly. I’m reluctant to go to that house in İzmir, which I used to look forward to each summer as a child.
Ever since I heard the news, I’m thinking about the meals we ate, dinner tables we set together. As if I had the best meals in the world with him, back then. We didn’t even need any cutlery, we ate anyway we saw fit, anywhere we saw fit, told no one, enjoyed our little food escapades.
“You eat meat with your hands, that’s how you savour it”, “You don’t bite into chocolate, you should let it melt slowly in your mouth”, “The way to eat a cookie is to break it and dunk it in milk”, “The greatest pleasure of eating cotton candy is to get it all on your face.”
‘To eat’ is the most fundamental action of living things since their existence. It also has a pleasure aspect in humans. Food has the power to stimulate all senses and create various different experiences. We can keep these sensations in our memories. That’s why we remember the food we ate at our grandparents’; what’s more is that as we remember, we smell it, taste it, and feel like we are eating that same thing again. Eating may be the most unnoticed human experience while we are in that moment. We remember flavours and scents when we relive it. The experience of that taste can be the most intense thing ever.
Along with all these feelings, there is one more thing we remember: The tools with which we eat. Tools we use not only to eat, but to live the experience, to feel the food with all our senses.
In that manner, our hands, mouths, feet, lips, tongues, fingers, fingernails… Anything can act as a ‘tool’. The sandwich in our sandy hands in the park, our fingers that scoop the bottom of a coffee cup, the scent of tangerine stuck in our fingernails while we try to peel it, berries that colour our lips like a lipstick…
If we want to turn a piece of food into an experience, we don’t really need any other tool, because anything can turn into ‘tools’ that convey messages to anyone who wants to see, who wants to feel. Cutlery are only tools for the ones who want to get their fill. Because sticking your tongue in a tiny bowl to scoop out the chocolate wouldn’t be seen appropriate on a table delicately set with classy cutlery. The act of sitting down at a table has an effect on the food we eat, the way we eat it, and the pleasure we get from it. The material, texture, softness, warmth or even the time the tool we eat with stays in our mouths can be significant factors.
These ‘tools’ that I, a grown woman, use, turn me into a little girl. I nibble, scoop with my tongue, press it on the roof of my mouth to savour each ‘moment’; not to eat, but for ‘pleasure’. Two tiny drops of fruit yoghurt that I enjoyed after minutes of effortful endeavour was much more satisfying and fulfilling than guzzling the whole thing.
The cold metal, soft silicone and forms which I can feel with my tongue created different sensations, and allowed me to feel ‘pleasure’ and ‘surprise’ simultaneously. Everything I felt was more like a momentary surprise than a prospective experience.
The most debated aspect of the projects can be regarding the ‘mark’ it leaves on us. If we take on an attitude towards questioning the norms, all these ‘tools’ can help us try new things and live our own little escapades, but it’s arguable how much this affects our eating and drinking habits.
This approach to the act of eating can drive these debates. While these tools have the potential for eating to stay in the ‘moment’, going back to ‘that moment’ may only rest with the individual.
