Injecting soul into devices

To illustrate the complexity of the kitchen, Germano Celant and Silvana Annicchiarico, curator and director of the 8th Triennale Design Museum, opted for an angle that exemplifies the transformation from the artisanal kitchen to the industrialised one: the universe of electric appliances.

On the same matter see also The dystopian epic of household appliances by Silvana Annicchiarico, published on Domus 990 April 2015.

So much more than simply the place where we prepare and conserve food, the kitchen is a highly symbolic coming together of what we are, what we appear to be and what we would like to be.

To illustrate this complexity at the 8th Triennale Design Museum, its curator and director Germano Celant and Silvana Annicchiarico opted for an angle that, perhaps more than all others, exemplifies the transformation from the artisanal kitchen to the industrialised one: the universe of electric appliances. Adopting the excellent metaphor of the Invaders, borrowed from The Bodysnatchers – a Jack Finney novel and a 1956 Don Siegel film – Celant has turned this type-story into an epic on the evolution of manufacturing. Electric appliances are far more than mute servants performing an action and become extensions of our bodies that boost our skills, demolishing the barrier between the natural and the artificial.

Arts & Food TDM8 — **Top**: the exhibition “Arts & Food” in the Triennale garden. Center, Sarah Lucas, *Florian and Kevin*, 2013, London. Courtesy Sadie Coles HQ; right, Paul McCarthy, *Daddies Tomato Ketchup Inflatable*, 2007. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth, London/Zurich; left, Renzo and Matteo Piano, *Piano Antico Table*, Riva1920; background, Giorgio de Chirico, *Bagni Misteriosi*, 1972-73. Photo © Attilio Maranzano. **Above**: View of Triennale Design Museum 8 “Cucina & Ultracorpi”, Triennale di Milano. Photo Gianluca Di Ioia

These aliens are only seemingly at our service although we do suspect them of observing us and conversing with each other more than with us. The impression gained along the complex exhibition route is that an apparently detached and scientific list of genres and types actually disguises a strongly advancing animist reading of the object. The inanimate explodes into life at the very beginning of the route in a section on alarms: a stroboscopic gallery filled with danger signals that remind us to use the invader with caution as, according to statistics, two fifths of domestic accidents occur in the kitchen

View of the exhibition “Arts & Food”. Le Corbusier, Mobilier Cuisine Atelier Le Corbusier Type 1, 1955. Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne / Centre de création industrielle. Left Le Corbusier, *Nature morte au hachoir*, 1928, Fondation Le Corbusier; still of the documentary *Architecture d’aujourd’hui*, 1930. Photo © Attilio Maranzano

An equally effective admonition of danger appears in the section on kitchen-robot blades. The relationship with humans features throughout a story packed with sensorial references that are constantly producing synesthetic effects: the cold of the refrigerators, the heat of the fires, the smell of coffee pots and the composting machines, a necessary presence given today’s compelling drive to recycle. “Theatricalised and differently animated – explains Annicchiarico – the kitchen designs a plurality of potential multi-material and multisensorial landscapes.” Of the five, the sense most present in the exhibition is perhaps that of hearing. Since John Cage’s 27 sounds manufactured in a kitchen – a concert for cutlery and pans mentioned in a splendid Patrizia Scarzella essay in the catalogue – domestic noise has accompanied our lives like a background soundtrack that, for this occasion, has been rewritten by designer-musician Lorenzo Palmeri in a score that immerses visitors in the sound world of our lives.

View of Triennale Design Museum 8 “Cucina & Ultracorpi”, Triennale di Milano. Photo Gianluca Di Ioia

A motley array of invaders speaks tellingly about us via Italo Rota’s extraordinary exhibition-design inventions – invaders in their own right! In these installations, the part represents the whole and they are clever storytellers with a more literary than technical imagination. An abacus divided by sub-types that “push a person to transit from one object to another, transforming the kitchen into an entity inhabited by extensions of ourselves, with which our body and behaviour must harmonise.” (Celant). The constant reference is 1950s-60s’ science fiction – not surprisingly the period when electrical appliances burst forcefully into our lives – but echoes of the past also hang in the air, particularly that delicate moment when humans were faced with the practical reason of the passage from the handmade to the machine-made. The 19th century was the epic time when the truth was outed and we saw the divide between the machine that is a super body, a prosthesis augmenting our natural potential, and the artificial that goes beyond the body, the alien or the other, bringing with it all the ensuing fear. It is what, back in 1817, the brilliant Mary Shelley identified as the mechanised monster, the Frankenstein too artificial to be allowed in but too human not to stir animist sentiment.

The display is not, of course, lacking in historic material of wide-ranging provenance. The postmodern dimension of the encyclopaedic maze draws many references into the dialogue, passing easily from memorable refrigerators of the past to Sottsass’s units for The New Domestic Landscape, and from the hundreds of variations on mechanical utensils to Gabriele Fiocco’s primitive and basic looking compost bins. One fact worthy of reflection emerges from the catalogue essays and appears in the curatorial choices: the three most cited projects are the Frankfurt Kitchen by Margarete Schutte-Lihotzky, the Electric House by Figini and Pollini and Joe Colombo’s Minikitchen (which the exhibition displays in a “cosmonautic” setting).

The core focus of all three designs was on what is today the main aspiration of human technology, how to squeeze the largest number of functions into the smallest possible space. The electric dream of possessing systems capable of governing extracorporeal functions – desired but also feared – suggests a possible illusion of spatial containment equalling control. This sense of possible control or its denial may also be the key to the many periodic tables on show, both in the exhibition designs and in the abundance of materials chosen. Once dismembered and broken down into its components, the machine can perhaps be analysed and vivisected without fear of reprisal. Or at least, that is what we hope.

The adoption of the list as a design method – and identified by Bruno Zevi as a prerogative of contemporary architecture – might be extended to the curatorial methods of recent years, an approach that, applied to such a well-defined type theme as the kitchen and its appliances, acts as a cultural reagent that really can trigger multiple reflections and address the many levels of interpretation posed by such an exhibition, especially when dealing with an EXPO and its mainstream audience. The results may, however, be harder to grasp when it is applied to the broader and macroscopic theme of “Arts & Foods”, the other large exhibition curated by Celant for the same audience and which, rather than adopting the list as a design method, might have benefited from a subject index to guide visitors through a topic that is in itself unbounded.

until 1 November 2015
Arts & Foods – Rituali dal 1851
until 21 February 2016
TDM 8: Cucine & Ultracorpi
Triennale di Milano

Injecting soul into devices

To illustrate the complexity of the kitchen, Germano Celant and Silvana Annicchiarico, curator and director of the 8th Triennale Design Museum, opted for an angle that exemplifies the transformation from the artisanal kitchen to the industrialised one: the universe of electric appliances.

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