Designed by Lara Chapman
Free / Audience Welcome
Everything can always be something else.
– Adhocism Manifesto
Stanley Picker Gallery are pleased to support Collaboration Café – a pop-up interactive dining event and performance employing new products created by Lara Chapman, graduating Product Design student at Kingston University.
“Collaboration Café subverts the habits and tools of eating to create an interactive environment where people are encouraged to collaborate in order to eat their meal. In a world that is increasingly dominated by fingers tap-dancing across screens and the constant undertones of clicking, whirring and beep-beeping, Collaboration Café rejects the digital and invites physical interactions that celebrate human connection. The event at the Stanley Picker Gallery will be a performance piece in which invited guests will enjoy a dinner on surfaces created by their own bodies and custom made tablecloth-aprons. Visitors may come and watch the dinner unfold and see the effects of disrupting the usual tools that we use to eat. The piece is part of a larger body of work which re-imagines accepted modes of eating and explores the effects of forcing collaboration through objects. Playfulness acts as a method for engagement. The unusual piques curiosity. The pieces aim to be fun, however their deeper agenda is to encourage people to question: Do we interact with each other enough? What is the value in doing so?. The designed objects are agents for reflection on society, exploring serious subjects in a light-hearted way.”