Text and Illustration for 16 People, 16 Plates book by 1616 Arita Japan.
Curated and edited by All the Way to Paris
I’m not too big of a cook.
Actually I’m not a cook at all.
Cooking, as creative playground has always been an evasive idea.
And therefore the kitchen has always been a room where my creativity mysteriously faded away.
As it was built from creative-Kryptonite.
But I refused to “lose the kitchen” as a lifetime scenario.
Kitchens are cool.
I can admit that I like to be awkwardly attracted to that which repels me.
Actually, leaving the cooking aside, kitchens are kind of my favourite place in the house.
For instance, when you are at a house party, the best spot of the party, is usually the kitchen.
After all, kitchens are “The heart of the House”, so where should the heart of the house party be at?
That’s because kitchens are, above all, social environments.
There is no other place in the house, where you share as much as in the kitchen.
As a cooking ignorant, I can only advocate for the kitchen as a creative social environment.
So when I designed my own house, where I hope I will live for the rest of my life, I made the biggest kitchen possible.
Which central piece is a 6 meter long table/countertop, and that’s where our daily life happens.
From bathing our baby, to building a model, from having an informal work meeting to learning how to cook by stealing my friends kitchen secrets.
Everything happens there.
My kitchen is not just related to food, but to life as a whole.
Along with groceries, and daily objects, I like to keep some small memories that I collect from my travels.
Souvenirs that inspire me or just work as social icebreakers.
As it was a never ending composite for a Nature Morte…
“Une Nature Vive”
A mixed media canvas where I deploy my Curiosity Cabinet.
A lichen from the woods surrounding Alvar Aalto’s Muratsaalo experimental house.
A plastic rocket from Tintin’s Voyage à la Lune
A burnt piece of brick from the old brick factory of the Inujima Island in Japan.
A copper “lucky charm” gifted by a fisherman from the hottest land in Colombia, a small village called Honda.
And so on.
