The Octopus Waffle Lab

The Octopus Waffle Lab
A participatory installation by Void & Co.
Open Source Gallery, New York (2020)

You are a dancing survivor.
Three hearts are beating in your boneless body.
Someone told me you make your ink out of the souls of dead sailors.
With your gentle, melancholy eyes you look at me,
and through them I spot a view of your home in the deep unseen.
Mesmerized by your transcendental grace
I want to be absorbed in your embrace,
which is like a force of love too strong for this world.
We could eat each other, simultaneously, in a cloud of ink
a black violet smokescreen concealing our pleasure.

The Octopus Waffle Lab is an invitation to collectively rethink our present perception of nourishment, considering the growing environmental challenges concerning nutrition.

Is the nourishment you need far from the kind that you want? When is something a powerful intuitive skill or just a bad habit? How do we differentiate between needs and desires? Have you ever eaten a word, a placebo, a memory or with your eyes closed? What is edible? How do we obtain the characteristics of what we eat?

Entering into The Octopus Waffle Lab, visitors are invited to join Void & Co. in a space for experimentation and conversation on how we obtain nourishment.

The performative installation explores food culture and -heritage, superstitions and emotional connections to food in a time where “what we eat shapes the future”.

Void & Co. is an inclusive platform for visual art projects run by Ditte Knus Tønnesen and Ronja Svaneborg. Void & Co. operates in the borderland between artistic and curatorial practice; orchestrating collaborations with other artists, partners and art institutions. The word void contains several connotations. It is a space that is empty, a place not yet filled, a gap or a vacuum. It can also mean a feeling of emptiness and loneliness; a feeling that something is missing. In its original form, the “void” may not be something to covet, but in this gap, there is enormous potential. A potential to fill out the yet unfilled with content and make sense. With their projects, Void & Co. tries to fill the void with stories that are missing in one way or another.

The exhibition is realised with the support from Open Source Gallery and its patrons, alongside Danish Art Workshops.

The Future Is What You Eat, X-ray, no. 5, black & white analog photogram on FB paper, 30,5 x 41,5 cm

Void & Co. in The Octopus Waffle Lab at Open Source Gallery, New York, 2020. Photo: Anja Matthes

The Octopus Waffle Wagon, 2020, Void & Co. Food cart, glasses, mixed ingredients, waffle makers, collection of 22 unique ceramic octopus plates made by Sabine Rosenstein