For the biennial, the team has rethought the domestic kitchen with a series of prototypes for “home appliances.” Emphasizing methods (such as grinding, salting, and pickling), products (such as edible plants foraged from fields), and tools (such as those used for underground cooling and fermentation) drawn from rural Anatolia, the team reimagines the contemporary home kitchen as an environment for communal work and pleasure in which food processing, cooking, and disposal form an integrated, interwoven cycle. The prototypes and drawings on display in the biennial shows the potential applications of their field research and kitchen testings. An elegant system of textile, paper, and Tyvek envelopes for drying and preserving herbs, a new kind of bread-making unit, and an alternative compost system (a compact kitchen unit in which worms rapidly process food waste into rich soil) are designed to create a sensorially pleasing and social atmosphere in the kitchen.
We strived for reintroducing the habits of our culinary culture and dietary system with different production techniques in a way that can facilitate our daily consumption by offering the following instructions:
Look at your food,
Think where it comes from,
Check your kitchen,
See what is missing,
Discover what you have,
Hack what you got,
Let your food pour out of your kitchen!
It is very difficult to fit the traditional production methods of Turkish cuisine (winepress, oil press, oven stones, drying, fermentation, grinding etc.) into the standard kitchen areas we have in the city. That’s why we developed units that can be used in different parts of homes/buildings or in common spaces of urban areas. Mobile Kitchen Island is designed for this purpose. This project, which couldn’t take place in the Biennial due to the shortage of funds, is still waiting to be implemented.
For the Biennial, alongside with the Mobile Kitchen Island, various designs were made to hack the small areas at homes. One of them is Drying Bag. By folding a paper, this product helps keeping the aromatic herbs fresh by drying them and without using the refrigerator.
These Drying Bags were inspired by the sellers in marketplaces, who package the herbs with papers to keep them fresh until buyers reach their homes. These bags, which were made by adopting different folding techniques, can be transformed into a system that preserves the vegetables when placed in a suitable spot at home. Similarly, this system was inspired by curtains, which are located in the most convenient indoor spots that are close enough to heater, were exposed to sunlight and is well-ventilated. In the process of the project, we designed booklets having the all the information we gathered alongside with statements on how to dry herbs and how to produce the Drying Bags. These booklets and curtains holding the bags were presented, as well.
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