TEA COURSE
In Kitchen Studio there is only one menu with a dizzying 99 tea selections to choose from. This tea menu was designed to pique the curiosity of the diners to the over-production of additives allowed in the Australian food industry with their corresponding e-numbers. The purpose was to try and force a relationship between flavour to each specific e-number in the form of a tea blend. Inside the oversized tea menu, a chemical madhouse of potential choices awaited the diner with a myriad of absurdist combinations that once chosen would form a flavoursome bounty, such as:
E627 Disodium-5-Guanylate
Rooibos, vanilla, cocoa nibs Disodium-5-Guanylate often finds itself paired with the golden child MSG. This enticing enhancer is absolutely peerless in flavour and problematic side-effects; hyperactivity, asthma and night terrors to name but a few. This blend is created with a spicy rooibos possessing an exceptional bulk density variation. So whilst coarse, this tea won’t bequeath you with either one the dastardly side-effects of E627.
(Menu written by Elizabeth Willing & Joseph Breikers)
The Host: Introductory Sequence (still image), Kitchen Studio, 2024, High Definition, 1080×1920 (9:16, Portrait), 31.17mins, looped. Sound: Anna Whittaker.
For me, the ocean with e-numbers atop it played on the semiotic expression to describe words without definite meanings as ‘floating signifiers’. These abstractions bobbed and sank as they eventually washed up on a non-descript sand bar. For most of us these signs are illegible without their proper assigned chemical makeups, freely circulated and added to our foods to enhance or endanger our experience. A total engineered fantasy to falsely satiate our desires. Like this small miracle, which is tea, and all the labour involved to create the ritual, the chemical signs finally come to rest on the birth of an island. A sandbar in the middle of nowhere, a beached sign ready to take root in one’s mind or gut.
