Renowned German designer, Mike Meiré, on assignment for Dornbracht, a manufacturer of bathroom fixtures, put the blitz on sterile, industrial-styled kitchens with a mobile kitchen installation which has touring the major art fair markets of the world for the past two years.
All that recessed lighting and uber sleek surfaces are just “so done and over with”, he declares.
In the “Farm Project”, Meiré turns the urban kitchen into a farmyard-like working studio that comes across as a playpen mix of ethnic deli, farmers market and high school science lab, each version reflective of the culture of its geographic local. At the Milan exhibit, a stuffed Canada goose hangs from the pot rack, trout swim above the sink and a future prosciutto snuffles about in a hay bed next to the icebox. In Miami, a box of cornflakes is stashed next to a case of Premier Cru Bordeaux.
The message: break out of your constipated, design-conscious aesthete, live larger, have more interaction with your food, and be more fully cognizant of where it all actually comes from.
Watch the official film produced by Dombracht and you’ll wonder if it wasn’t actually comedian Mike Meyer who cooked this whole thing up. The longer you look at it, the more the presentation seems like a camp send up on German engineering, if not a little "Darma Initiative".
But view the You Tube interview with a Florida film crew below and strangely, Meiré’s ideas start making perfect sense. If he mentioned a rabbit bottle opener, you’d just assume he meant an actual furry one.
