DESIGN & MAKING [THE STORY OF FOOD].
Presented by The Cape Craft & Design Institute and the Social History Collections Department of Iziko Museums of SA.
At Iziko Good Hope Gallery, Castle of Good Hope until October 12. GENNA GARDINI reviews.
IN HER 2014 Caine Prize-nominated short story Chicken, young writer Efemia Chela evocatively describes food from across cultures and contexts. Here, she uses ways of preparing, distributing and enjoying nourishment
as a metaphor for the various phases of a young woman’s life.
I thought about this story and its preoccupation with food in Africa while attending the Design & Making [the story of food] exhibition.
The show, an official World Design Capital 2014 project, tracks the history of objects used to preserve and transport foodstuff throughout the ages, mostly on our continent.
The exhibition focuses on the evolving design of these objects, which move from the appropriation of food structures (like eggs used to carry water) to the invention of plastic.
The viewer is encouraged to travel from contemplating storage solutions like large clay pots to interacting with computerised descriptions of futuristic packaging.
The exhibition forms a sort of evolutionary diagram of food design.
The origins of the show can be traced to the World Design Capital’s call for works that investigate and describe the relationship between design and food in Cape Town. On the cover page of the exhibition’s catalogue, an engraved ostrich egg, an ice bucket filled to the brim and a plastic water bottle rest together.These make up a trifecta of water containers through the ages, with all of their historical connotations placed in a sort of chronological order.
The exhibition effectively consists of three sections: The first is a selection of historical objects from across the globe and provided by Iziko’s Social History Collections Department.
The second includes a series of installations which track the evolution of storage design while also speculating about
what the future of packaging may hold. The final part is made up of contemporary storage items, which embrace futuristic and historical aesthetics and were created by designers in the Western Cape.
The location of [the story of food], a top room in the Iziko Good Hope gallery, is tucked into the Castle of Good Hope. The provincial heritage site’s website describes the building as “steeped in history”.
had not been to the castle since my days as a teenager on school outings, where the container carrying our lunches was also a primary focus. I found the site of the exhibition, the oldest building in Cape Town, laden with its layers of painful history, somewhat distracting.
It was clearly chosen because of its links to the Dutch East India Company, which built the castle. In the first section of the show items from Africa, Asia and Europe are showcased. These objects are fascinating and the family tree (or perhaps, family Tupperware collection) they form is interesting to follow.
The curatorial vision is clear, allowing viewers to explore the line between each new design innovation. Visitors move from contemplating rice baskets to mason jars to tin cans to milk canisters to plastic bottles, interrogating the relationships between them. The show provides educational insight into the history of food preservation, storage and packaging.
Since the exhibition is called the “story of food”, I found myself trying to fill in the narrative blanks between installations. These blanks were made up of gaps between time periods and shifts in ways of thinking, but also in leaps between historical moments.
It is disconcerting to consider the remains of a colonial container with Queen Victoria’s disapproving face glaring from it.
These tins carried more than just food, they carried pain and unheard stories. It was perhaps no coincidence that these objects were placed next to an installation which considered how various places stored salt. In a country where access to food and water is not available to all, ideas around access have urgent questions about problematic legacies and uncertain futures attached to them.
Perhaps I was reminded of Chela’s short story Chicken because, in it, the young protagonist understands herself and others to carry the hopes that are associated with food. Like Chicken, the exhibition reminds us that the relationship between design and food is really the relationship between people and history.
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