Nutrition is always subject for theories, more or less extreme. Also for design and art food became object of reflection, such as in the controversial but effective Sonja Stummerer & Martin Hablesreiter’s vision, who have staged Eat Body Design at the Baerengasse Museum of Zurich. This is a performance inspired by food, body and the hyper-hygienic society we live in, which tends to not consider that what we eat is not “fuel” for the body, but the body itself. To show this concept artists have recreated an operating room, where a body open on the table shows a belly full of meat, while bread and vegetables substitute the arts we move. Taking Roland Barthes’s words, about to think about food, before you taste it, the head is open too and filled with pieces of bread and wine, as if to symbolize the bases of nutrition. In addition, next to the operating table, was set up another table showing parts of the body such as the brain and heart out of marzipan, a leg made of wheat, sausages instead of intestines, along with the tools that artists have used to prepare the body: interesting to see how the medical tools are mixed with cooking ones. With a decidedly out of the ordinary interpretation, the message sent is that what you eat provides your body and its cells the ability to regenerate, the way we artificially do in an operating room. In addition the parallelism with surgery wants to synthesize the hygienic/sanitary approach we have today with food. The end result, though at first glance may reject, after a more careful observation is fascinating and invites the visitor to reflect with wit and, perhaps, just a hint of irony.
