Food Sluice
FOOD SLUICE
On the one hand, the title of the project refers literally to the organised channelling of prepared food. A sluice regulates the movement of food between two spaces, and in accordance with its principle, there is never any direct exchange between the two sides. This is where the symbolic dimension of the lock lies: it prevents the interaction of two areas, regardless of the reasons for prioritising and necessity, but at the same time it points to an existing relationship between the two.
The project was developed in response to a call for proposals for an artistic intervention in an inner-city space where different population groups are supposed to encounter each other. The fact that this artificially arranged encounter between ‘legitimate’ citizens and the ‘others’ experienced as problematic usually only comes about under one-sided conditions and thus ultimately never really comes about is reflected in the absurdity of the lock setting.
ABOUT THE PROJECT STRUCTURE
The entire project area consists of three rooms: dining room, kitchen and airlock. While the dining room is open to the public, the kitchen is reserved for staff only; the central element in between, the airlock, is used to transport the meals.
A pass-through divides an area into two parts, in this case the dining room and kitchen, and is thus both a connecting and a separating element; interaction is strictly regulated. As is usual with a pass-through, although it is potentially accessible from both sides, it can only be used in one direction: movement in it is inevitably always in one direction – here from the kitchen to the dining room, never the other way around.
The dining room is visible from the street. It is furnished in a modern style and perfectly equipped to meet the preferences of an upscale clientele. However, there is no staff here; the guests are completely on their own. They order and pay for their meals electronically, at a machine installed in the room, where they enter certain order codes and then pick up the selected meals at the airlock.
The kitchen staff cannot be seen from the dining room, and access to the kitchen is only possible via a separate staff entrance. The entire room layout is designed to avoid any contact between guests and staff. The only means of communication is the electronically transmitted code for ordering food.
The style and ambience of the restaurant correspond to the demands and expectations of a broad, culturally and culinarily adept segment of the population. The guests at the Food Sluice are interested in experiencing social gatherings and/or business obligations over a good meal in a pleasant atmosphere. The people serving them, although not identifiable as such, are also here, as in all OUTCAST REGISTRATION projects, made up of current and former prisoners, current and former drug addicts, who prepare the ordered dishes under the supervision of chefs.
The range and quality of the dishes are excellent, although the prices are significantly lower than those of other restaurants of a comparable standard. However, the restaurant differs in that an essential legitimising dynamic of fine dining does not apply here: the usual mutual confirmation of belonging between guests and hosts is completely absent.
SIMULATION OF SOCIAL RELATIONSHIPS
With the privileged guests on one side and the almost invisible staff on the other, the ‘food sluice’ symbolises the lack of contact between two irreconcilable groups in society within a specific social setting. The ‘food sluice’ is therefore a theatrical staging, a simulation of contemporary social structures and ideas.
Its principle is similar to that of the coin-operated fast food vending machines at French motorway service stations, which dispense sausages day and night, or the dormitories in overcrowded Japanese cities, where you can get a bed with breakfast by paying by credit card, without encountering staff. Both are based on the idea of freeing people from exhausting, humiliating work by means of machines, and in this way offering programmed, anonymous, round-the-clock functionality instead of costly individual care and personal encounters. The machine – in this case the vending machine for the selected meals – merely plays the role of communicative mediator between the client and the service provider. What is suppressed, or rather deliberately ignored, is the fact that behind the mechanical processing of the operation there are still people who carry out the work assigned to them.
According to the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, the question of human existence is not determined by what a person is, but where he or she is: namely in the world, or more precisely, in a ‘human park’.[1] The fact that every person must necessarily be located somewhere implies that their existence is statically bound to a location. However, it also follows that a fellow human being, who is discredited as unequal, is denied access to that area of the park that is reserved for a specific group.
So one group can enjoy exquisite food in a dignified setting, while the other group remains hidden in the kitchen, preparing the food in response to anonymous electronic prompts. Sloterdijk attributes this one-sided rejection of an equal and unrestricted right of presence and active participation for all people to the norms that apply to Western ‘parks’: it is a life in the comfort zone that does not tolerate any disruptive factors. The pronounced need for help beyond its borders escapes the perception of its privileged inhabitants.
CHRONIC AMBIVALENCE
And yet, this comfortably established exclusivity brings with it disadvantages: the supposedly carefree calm in the tamed consumer society in turn generates boredom and thus stress. These two fundamental tones of the all-too-comfortable existence create a mood of chronic ambivalence, in which disquiet and reassurance must constantly alternate. Boredom is therefore banished with various forms of artificially induced excitement, and the subsequent onset of an equally unpleasant state of stress and alarm is quickly alleviated with psychological or even spiritual methods of so-called life coaching, which explains the enormous increase in their popularity and acceptance.
An urge that is difficult to define, to break out of the cocoon of a leisurely existence and at the same time to find confirmation in it, underlies the mass desire to seek out the strange and unknown, the wild and exotic, the broken, crazy, ugly and horrifying. However, it is not about seeing, experiencing and understanding something or someone in its or their otherness, because that would require a genuine interest, a sense of community. Rather, it is about a soothing legitimation of who and what one is oneself – clearly noticeable in view of the difference to the (supposedly) completely ‘other’.
To achieve this triumphant feeling, people are willing to visit certain places such as a circus or a zoo, remote areas, disaster areas, slums or red-light districts. They can indulge in a collective gaze and shudder in the comforting certainty of going home afterwards, reassured by the realisation that they don't have to be or live that way.
DISTORTED PERCEPTIONS
The attempt to establish a café in Amsterdam run by sex workers with heroin addictions, who wanted to get out of prostitution by this means, failed due to the morbid curiosity described above. The revelation of personal vulnerability was too one-sided to shake the sense of grandeur of the sensation-seeking guests; rather, it reinforced it.
Hannah Arendt argued that the public sphere can be an area in which the ‘presence of others, who see what we see and hear what we hear [...] assures us of the reality of the world and of ourselves’.[2] In this ever-present ‘tissue of human affairs’, ‘which is formed wherever people live together’, we weave ‘threads’ into an already existing ‘pattern’ through our actions and speech pattern. By bringing in our ‘life stories’ with their ‘countless, conflicting intentions and purposes’, we ‘change’ this fabric and ‘affect’ each other ‘in a unique way’.[3] However, according to Arendt, this requires that we meet in freedom and equality – an indispensable requirement that, as the example of the Amsterdam café described at the beginning makes clear, , is often not realised.
And there is something else that can be seen from this, namely that outsiders – whether voluntarily or involuntarily in this role – also have a longing to enter the comfort zone. In the case of (ex-)junkies, however, the experience of being socially branded as ‘scum’ and the desire for a lost or never-experienced bourgeois existence often collide drastically.
Driven by the desire for this different, better life, junkies fantasise about being released from their previous existence when they have finally completed their therapy or are released from prison. This hope is fuelled by the idea of seeing therapy and imprisonment as rehabilitation measures to help prisoners practice their future life in the community in a safe environment. However, experience has shown that imitation and artificially imposed middle-class lifestyles do not lead to a truly successful life in freedom and society, nor to self-confidence based on independence. The effort to follow the norms of ‘normal’ life not only stands in stark contrast to the life experience of former prisoners, but also distorts realistic expectations of it.
HYPERREALISTIC REALITY
The ‘food sluice’ is the quintessential place where people's fundamental desires for recognition and belonging are reflected. While the guests of the dining room satisfy these needs through the luxurious food among their peers, the staff in the kitchen, who are neatly separated from them, derive their legitimacy from their mere, albeit invisible, presence in the scene.
In the case of the Amsterdam café, this self-assurance took the form of a kind of distinguished voyeurism: the non-belonging is viewed with relish and thus confirmed as such. This need is fulfilled for the guests of the Schleuse by the quietly, passively enjoyed certainty that their wishes are being taken care of in secret – however and by whomever.
The kitchen staff, in turn, in their illusory longing to enter this comfort zone, endeavour to find a way in by adapting and imitating, in order to participate in bourgeois life in some way. Ultimately, however, the guests knowingly and willingly leave their desire for participation unfulfilled.
What, after all, is the point of the ‘food sluice’? There is none. It is a simulation, and so – to quote Baudrillard – it is ‘that irresistible process in which things are linked together as if they had meaning, while in fact they are organised only by an artificial montage and by nonsense’.[4] The food sluice is a hyper-realistic version of reality that ultimately defies any meaningful interpretation or solution – and precisely in this way it glaringly refers back to real conditions .
[1] See Peter Sloterdijk: Rules for the Human Park. A Response to Heidegger's Letter on Humanism, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1999.
[2] Hannah Arendt: The Human Condition. New York: Harper & Row, 1968, p. 381.
[3] Ibid., p. 225 f.
[4] Jean Baudrillard: ‘The Rise of the Void to the Periphery’, in: The Illusion of the End or The Strike of Events. Translated from the French by Ronald Vouillé. Berlin: Merve 1994, pp. 29-40 (?), here p. 30.