Potato starch

Welcome: (a) ceremony

The choice of materiality for the table is part of a broader research on hospitality and intimacy in the domestic space. Ultimately represented through an installation and performance.

Through staging intimacy, role shifts are evident and shaped, with the audience performing their position and feelings according to a given framework and power, played by the performer. Unfolding in several spaces and scenographies, the performance starts with the act of receiving and awaiting, with the audience seated around a 12 meter long table and the performer interacting and moving freely around and on top of it.

By picking elements of a domestic space, the audience and performance find themselves equally part of the play and put on the same level, constantly negotiating the table, the frame of the role and power play. Consequently, its materiality mirrors the different roles of the table in the play: as a stage, it shows the evolutions of the roles, through its anthropomorphic surface, a body that almost takes shape during the play, as a landscape it reveals the times of this process, through cracks and hills, craters and incrustations.

Making process

The material choices and mixture had to meet two necessities: artistically, it needed to resemble skin, while pragmatically it needed to be easily produced, as it needed to cover a relatively large surface. Various types of organic starches were investigated, eventually potato was chosen. Because of its peculiar translucency and light reflection, similar to the grease of human skin. A combination of oil from seeds and coconut was adopted for malleability and to avoid surface cracking during drying phase.

Future paths to further develop the project would be to replace the current glue by a more sustainable alternative.

Text submitted by the maker and edited by the Future Materials Bank. For information about reproducing (a part of) this text, please contact the maker.