Vienna Design Week 2013: Marlene Klausner – Depot_0411

For reasons we’ve never truly understood “food” always crops ups somewhere, in some context during Vienna Design Week. Fortunately the organisers appear to have finally stopped designers growing herbs and vegetables in public places and have instead moved on to explore other, more practical, aspects of our modern relationship to what we eat and how we can best organise food production and distribution in the future.

Among the projects this year is Depot_0411 by Austrian designer Marlene Klausner.

One of the wonders of “nature” is that is has evolved complex negative feedback loops, systems that regulate cycles by responding to over and under production and so ensuring natural systems remain in balance.

One of the wonders of “man” is that we just don’t get that.

Food production is a perfect example.

Responding to the food supply problems of the immediate post-war decades we developed industrial food production methods and built distribution systems based on continual food supply rather than meeting actual needs.

Five decades later we have reached a situation of hopeless over production, over consumption and over disposing.

Food production, at least in a European context, is chronically out of balance. And there is no negative feedback loop about to kick in and restore equilibrium.

And so it is up to us all individually to cease the initiative. Not just by buying less but using the less that we buy better.

Situated in the cellar of the Vienna Design Week Festivalzentral Depot_0411 is in principle nothing more complicated and radical than a reminder that you can store fruit and veg.

Often for months.

Which is something many of us have simply never learned, or at least have forgotten if we ever did. Memories of your granny going to the washhouse to dig up a few potatoes from the mound of earth in the back corner being more fond memories of granny than her food storage strategy.

For Vienna Design Week Marlene Klausner presents four storage systems: a shelf for apples, a slightly more complicated shelf for potatoes, a sand pit for beets and a vinegar fermentation barrel, albeit a transparent perspex vinegar fermentation barrel so that visitors can see what is happening.

The point isn’t to show anything new, but to stimulate debate and discussion. Standing in the cellar it is clear how easy it all is. How obvious. And if that is easy and obvious, what else is easy and obvious? Do we not make life more complicated for ourselves than we need to? How did we get to this remote region of the Republic of Absurdia?

Depot_0411 is in effect a communication design project. And a very effective one at that.

Although amid all the theorising and reflection we must admit to being very taken with the idea of owning a transparent perspex vinegar fermentation barrel….

In addition to the demonstration in the cellar there will be a discussion on Friday October 4th with Peter Krobath from “Stadtfrucht Wien” about the current and future possibilities of common, publicly accessible fruit trees in urban environments.

Full details can be found at www.viennadesignweek.at

And for all who can’t make it to Vienna, a few impressions to help stimulate local debate…… (and yes, normally the light would be counter-productive. It is only for aiding viewing …..