new spaces 10 EN

22 Text: Anuschka Seifert Photos: Imagecontainer/Knölke Helsinki, Sörnäinen, 11 a.m., 30°Celsius. The designer Martí Guixé is standing under a bright blue sky at the end of the pier of an old freight harbour. The contrast between the 13 futuristic solar cookers made of highly polished aluminium sheeting and their surroundings could not be greater. Guixé’s colleague, the 35-year-old chef Antto Melasniemi, who has made a reputation for himself as a visionary, is busy making a salad consisting of wild plants, carrots, caulifl ower, radishes and pumpkin seeds. Melasniemi, who comes from Finland, energetically mixes the vegetables with fi nely chopped wild herbs and fi ne Dauro olive oil from Spain. To fi nish, he decorates each plate of salad with edible fl owers from local meadows. The result is a fi ne example of the new Nordic cuisine. In the meantime, Guixé, wearing a sun hat and refl ecting sunglasses, is strolling from one solar cooker to the next. The cookers consist of a parabolic mirror with a device for hanging cookware at the mirror’s focal point and a framework on wheels. “Because of its low focal point, the cooker must be adjusted to the sun’s movement only every half-hour,” says Guixé. “Because the sunbeams are focused, the food to be cooked can be heated to temperatures higher than 300°Celsius.” The results can be seen and smelled. The chocolate cake is just about to burn and the tomato and goat’s cheese casserole with potatoes boiled in their jackets is almost done. “It’s not so easy to use these solar cookers, which were developed for the Third World, for cooking, grilling, roasting and frying. The most important thing is not the ingredients and the dishes, but sun cream, a head covering and a pair of sunglasses,” Guixé adds. “Incidentally, these solar cookers have not been widely accepted so far. In most developing countries it’s so hot that the people there only start cooking when it starts to get dark,” explains Melasniemi as he puts on his glacier sunglasses. Then he turns the parabolic mirrors downward one after another in order to reduce the cooking temperature. In the meantime, the long wooden tables, which were designed by Guixé, have been covered with white tablecloths that fl utter in the wind. The Alessi crockery and glasses were created by Jasper Morrison, whose strictly functional design lends his products an air of refi ned simplicity. The highlights are the wooden stools designed by Guixé, which are held together by a wide blue band. If you want to fold up your stool, you stand up and simply pull on the band. If you unfold the stool’s legs, the band is stretched across the seat, thus holding the wood together and giving the stool stability. Simple place settings for about 60 guests, with a panoramic view of the city centre’s skyline, are set up in front of the counter where Melasniemi is now cleaning blueberries. The improvised “sun kitchen” restaurant is standing on just over 500 square metres of hastily levelled ground which form a completely new space on the abandoned pier. It couldn’t be more simple and austere, and yet one defi nitely has the feeling that the tables have been set for an exquisite meal. For Guixé, who says he works on “clever and simple ideas with curiosity and seriousness”, this temporary restaurant off ers the opportunity “to rethink our relationship with kitchens, cooking, eating and drinking, especially with regard to nature”. The fi rst guests arrive about 11:30 a.m. Most of them come on bicycles, only a few by car. They are well-dressed people — couples, families with children and youngsters wearing ultracool sunglasses and Birkenstock sandals. They’ve found out on Facebook that the pop-up restaurant sponsored by the Finnish beer manufacturer Lapin Kulta (Gold from Lapland) is opening here today. For Melasniemi and Guixé, neither the solar cookers nor the organic produce is worth a special mention, as they believe that sustainability should be a matter of course. They prefer to focus on concepts such as fl exibility and directness. Guixé feels more at home in the world of abstract concepts than in the material world. In Melasniemi, a former keyboard player in the Finnish band HIM, he has found the right culinary partner. “For years I looked for an unconventional chef with whom I can share ideas and develop joint projects,” he says. “Antto and I are doing something that the great chefs don’t dare to do: we’re taking the art of cooking to its limits and trying to burst its boundaries.” Guixé regards himself as a “tapaist” and a “techno-gastrosopher”, but primarily as an ex-designer. “My projects are generally very abstract, and they’re shown in art galleries,” he says. “But I’m neither an artist nor a designer in the academic sense. In order to defi ne my position, I think the most appropriate thing to call me is an ex-designer.” However, since he continues to do design work, he is often called an “ex-ex-designer”. Guixé often explains that he actually hates objects. He likes to take objects of daily use and relate them to himself. Everything that is superfl uous — the shape — disappears, and the object in itself becomes a message. Instead of designing yet another chair — “We only need two chairs in our lives” — he pre- Martí Guixé is from Catalonia and studied in Barcelona and Milan. He is regarded as one of the most unconventional designers of our time. Nonetheless, he is very critical of design in itself. He gained his notoriety primarily because of his off beat designs in the fi eld of food design as well as his shop designs for Camper and the Desigual fashion label and his designs for Authentics, Droog and Alessi. He has repeatedly questioned the world of products and design through his conceptual designs such as “Pharma Food”; “Park Life”, architectural kitchen modules in natural settings; and his remarks about design, such as his “picture frame from a tape dispenser”. Guixé has published numerous books and exhibited his works in venues including MoMA (New York), mudac (Lausanne), MACBA (Barcelona) and the Centre Pompidou (Paris). He lives and works in Barcelona and Berlin.

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