Though Olafur Eliasson’s new monograph-cookbook Studio Olafur Eliasson: The Kitchen may pair, say, a recipe for miso with a curator-penned poem about soybean fermentation, “it’s not about food as art,” emphasizes the Danish-born, Berlin-based Eliasson. Rather, the book, recently published by Phaidon, “is itself a recipe for reality production,” he says, somewhat gnomically. Each day, the 90-odd people working in Eliasson’s Berlin studio gather for a meal, a process here documented through texts contributed by studio members and lush, suitably bohemian photographs of their meals and events. The recipes compiled are all vegetarian and written to serve either 6 or 60—think Yotam Ottolenghi–style dips and root vegetable stews; Alice Waters wrote the introduction, and her plant-heavy culinary influence looms large. A strictly finger food meal that was served during a Curatorial Approach Marathon is documented: “The absence of utensils brought focus to the ways meals can be curated,” we are reminded. “You are the dishes you use.” Ultimately, Eliasson and his cohorts here celebrate the everyday act of eating as something social, and therefore loaded with relational potential. “Meals are the glue that connects the studio,” he says. “It’s an opportunity for people to meet and build sympathetic, empathetic relationships with one another.”
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