Maastricht

Can you imagine how much we, as human beings, are entangled with what surrounds us?

Created in reference to Jan van Eyck’s altarpiece, Re-table(au) questions our relationship to food, inspired by the edible plants depicted in the painting. Looking at it with a contemporary perspective, the installation echoes this imaginary garden, symbolizing two aspects of our current food system; blurred seasonality and locality. Centralized around the tentacular relation between food, time and space, the piece activates the perpetual movement of foodsystems. The work emphasizes on being a colourful sensorial ecosystem activating the relation between plant, landscape and the body. The work contains printed textiles, ceramics and preserved flavours that are all sourced from plants and represent contemporary tools for ceremonial rituals, feeding our eater imagination.

Magnolia
I like to gather my thoughts during my morning walk through the garden. Planting ideas, and let them grow to feed my imagination. It all starts with the gesture of creating a relationship between food, time and space, like a tentacular composition.

When you wander through a landscape, how can the landscape wander through you? 

Perpetual movement
Imagine a garden with endless loops and routes where you discover different smells, patterns and textures when the hours of the day pass by. The garden isn’t frozen in time. It is constantly changing, growing and renewing itself. When you want to be part of this garden you must embrace this movement, lose yourself and reactivate your relationship with it again and again. 

Can you imagine how much we, as human beings, are entangled with what surrounds us?

Apple breaking open
Our work is not everlasting. Grounded in the moment, we immerse ourselves in a landscape and we embody its sensorial ecosystem, conscious of its ephemeral quality. It bursts open, it is to be shared and in the end, it flows away.

Gent

Kleureyck experience

Where does color come from? How do you create color? What is the impact of color? For the Van Eyck year in Ghent, the museum is hosting a major exhibition on innovative and diverse uses of color. The expo starts from Jan van Eyck’s unseen shades and shows what color means to contemporary designers. De Onkruidenier collaborated with Céline Pelcé (FR) and Marente van der Valk (UK) at the invitation of the Food Lab of the Jan van Eyck Academy.

With the creation assignment, we are challenging the relationship between food and time/place. In the experience room a laboratory will be built in which different questions will be investigated. How may we store fresh food over time and how do its properties (color/taste) evolve? How may we preserve food (through fermentation, preservation in beeswax, but also by making objects with it). How may we re-emphasize the origin of the product and the time it takes to grow? The laboratory will evolve with us through the seasons as a kind of foodscape. After all, color changes and nuances progress slowly over time. These processes also refer to alchemy, the colors and patterns in Jan van Eyck’s work. This results in various ‘tasting events’ and workshops on the rhythm of the seasons in which we involve the public in the designs in an interactive, inviting and tasty way. The events also refer to the profane traditions with which people in earlier times celebrated the transition of the seasons.