Food Odyssey: Gastronomy & Wine Tasting Experiences at KSEVT.

There are some pretty strange things happening in the tiny Slovenian village of Vitanje. People in strange suits are licking walls, drinking from tubes and contorting their bodies across a vast industrial space. No, this isn’t a 90s rave, it’s the latest exhibition from the AA Visiting School Nanotourism who have joined forces with The Cultural Centre of European Space Technologies (KSEVT) to explore the possibilities of fine dining and wine tasting in outer space.

The AA Visiting School have taken two groups of international students and developed the projects named Food Odyssey and Gravity which integrate KSEVT with local existing gastronomic production and offer a unique culinary experience for the local community and daily visitors.

Food Odyssey, a play on 2001: Space Odyssey, explores how we might experience fine dining in outer space and uses KSEVT as a functioning venue for a site-specific dining experience. With the notable absence of gravity, a set of eating scenarios were developed that question the traditional notion of dining. The intrinsic elements of dining such as the napkin, table, chair, plate and cutlery were all re-imagined.

To begin, guests wear their large pleated napkin instead of placing it on their laps. Next their appetiser is presented in the form of a floating sphere suspended by a bunch of helium balloons forcing them to expertly coax it into their mouths. The soup and main course simulate artificial gravity and the table and place settings are transported to the wall. Through material and ingredient experimentation the food miraculously stays on the vertical plate. Then as if it were a scene out of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, people tackle their meals by eating and licking it straight off the walls – no hands mind you!

In collaboration with Zlati Grič a renowned regional winery, students looked at KSEVT as an opportunity for a site-specific, experimental wine tasting adventure. And from this they created Gravity: A User’s Manual, KSEVT Wine Tasting Experience.

The result is pretty trippy yet quite interesting. The students transformed the space into an endless sloping ground plane which challenges the visitor’s relationship with gravity. According to the students, “the project manifests itself as a reinterpretation of the traditional wine glass, in an event-specific wearable suit, which, through a systematically attached system of tubes, challenges you to use your body movement as a way of drinking your “glass” of wine. As a result, the wine tasting experience at KSEVT becomes a body performance choreographed by the path of the tube transferring a sip of wine from the injection bag to your mouth.” There are some incredibly dynamic movements created by this scenario where people literally bend over backwards for their wine. Don’t worry, I know the feeling.

Incorporating the space technologies at their disposal, these students have certainly subverted the traditional notion of dining and wine tasting. Such a fun and thorough exploration with awesome potential!