Ctrl_Space Lab in partnership with MAN-GA Architects has participated at the COOK8 THE NEW DINING PLACE International Design Competition. https://cook8.gr/en/
MANIFESTO OF CALCULATED NAIVETY
The history of all hitherto existing restaurants is the history
of calculated naivety.
A specter is haunting Cookland—the specter of Postmaterialism!
Protestantism and need have been the ethical condition of
capitalism and desire.
In our epoch, capitalism becomes the generator of a new distanciated
purism as a mediated culture of excess; the ultimate conspiracy of sensualism
as the relativist matrix of material bodies raised back to the status of the
imperishable.
The unavoidable stake would be the following: 8 ought not to be
dead to re-enter paradise lost†.
† Paradise lost: not because questions were
raised, neither because lovers took consciousness of pleasure, but because 8 bodies
started cooking games; the latter being the primal generator of knowledge. Their
primary existence lies in the garden of nature as the book of the ubiquitous
truth. Aporia leads 8 to the model of nature as knowledge; thus 8 open the
register of desire driven and motivated by the economy of loss and
non-satisfaction. In the post-materialist condition, here lies the sense of
contemporary art; to postpone the tragic feeling of the loss of motivation,
since, when anything goes, nothing happens anymore.
The Cook is a Curator.
She is there to restaure the
condition of naivety as a mediated relative experience of nature and purity.
The Cook is God. The Cook is invisible. Food has always already been there.
Food lies there to be found. Food as nature. The tragic as a cosmopolitan 50
euros event. 8 may not be naïve just because 8 want to. 8 eat not to survive
neither. 8 need to buy a two hours ticket to a game of desire, nature and the
sense of eternal return. 8 eat to recover the sense of historical circularity
and to repress, for a while, the meaning of the materialist experience so far.
Total seclusion allows for the abolishment of restrain. 8 wish to be there. 8
will never admit having been there. 8 are watching; a vision of synergy and
shared guilt. This is the sheer and painless difference between eating naked
and eating stripped.
Competition results will be presented at the homonymous exibition at the Benaki Museum and at a new publication by DOMES International Architecture Review.
