RICHARD MITCHELL
design & strategy

White Night Auckland is an annual public arts event held around the Auckland region. In 2015, the Food Design Institute took part in the Remuera event. The Remuera event is billed as "... a night-time cultural festival that transforms the urban space into an arts destination for experiencing the best of new and experimental art forms, performances and culture."

As creative director, I brought together a team of nine chefs, front-of house experts and food designers to develop the overall concept, design and test the menu items and design the overall experience. My role included leading the development of the concept, contributing to all ideation sessions and providing feedback on prototypes, leading the design of the experience, including designing the lighting and music for the experience.

​

CONCEPT: WHITE NIGHT VS BLACK FOREST

The overarching concept for the experience was a questioning of the cultural hegemony of (French) culinary arts and fine dining. It was driven by recent calls in academic literature for a critical questioning to occur in culinary arts practice that takes it beyond its non-reflexive existence (by Joseph Hegarty amongst others).

The experience was designed to have guests leave with a feeling that they had experienced a completely new way of eating: an experience unconstrained by the formal structures of traditional fine dining but that had some key reference points for them to be able to make sense of it.

​

A SERIES OF BOURDIEUSIAN OPPOSITES

Drawing upon Bourdieu's discussions of cultural capital, the experience was underpinned by a series of opposites that explored the the structural and agentic dialects inherent in the (Francophile) fine dining tradition. The 'white' dish was founded on the structures of the Francophile hegemony of fine dining, while the 'black' dish was a decoupling of these structures that attempted to give agency back to the guest. These opposites included:

​

• The objectified cultural capital contained in the structures of tableware, place settings, traditional chef's uniforms and service structures (white) vs a dish plated directly on the table devoid of the objects of traditional fine dining (cutlery, plates, etc) by 'chefs' with no formal chef's uniform (black).

​

• A (white) dish was designed to be consumed as a (Foucauldian) gaze (highly manipulated and with high visual appeal) vs a (black) dish designed to be more performative (tubes of food that guests needed to play with, plated directly in front of the guest and no formal eating utensils). (This approach has subsequently been discussed by Kaufman in relation to Modernist cuisine.)

​

• The use of 'exotic' (white) ingredients and unfamiliar (complicated and secret) cooking techniques to 'sacralise' the act of eating. Informed by Belk et al's work on sacralisation, the 'white' dish was served with a high degree of ritual and ceremony and was accompanied by the chant of Gregorian monks. This was contrasted with familiar ingredients (chocolate) and cooking techniques (cooked as a brownie) served in 'profane' ways (playing with your food, plated directly on the table, etc) to electronic club music to reinforce the profane. The profanity of the black dish reinforced the sacredness of the 'white' by providing a profane eating experience in opposition to it (Durkheim).

​

• The language structures used in the menu description were also carefully chosen to reflect the sacred and the profane:

  • "White Night: Lychee & Coconut Cloud Nigiri" - the exoticism of lychee and nigiri (as a dessert) and the reference to the purity of white and clouds as heavenly/other-worldly.

  • Black Forest: Dark Fruit and Chocolate Fetish" - forest and darkness as places of profanity the 'forbidden' and the clear profanity of fetishism (as a profane interpretation of chocolate which often has sacred connotations).

​

• Before entering guests were greeted with a marshmallow (laced with beneficial botanicals) on a stick which they toasted themselves. They were then asked to don a plastic apron. They were told nothing of the experience that was to come nor anything about the food. This was set up to contrast the normal structures of fine dining, where guests have a clear expectation of what lies ahead (service model, style of cuisine, menu - but not always, reputation of the restaurant or chef, atmosphere, etc). The 'pre-dining experience' became a key mechanism for challenging what the diners consider to be 'normal'.

​

This was intended as a relational aesthetic performance (in the tradition of Rikrit Tiravanija), where guests were introduced to a space that allowed them to also develop their own experience, interpretation, emotions and stories (they effectively became a part of the art). As such, each of the five performances over the evening unfolded as unique experiences co-created by the guests and the hosts.

​

A total of 90 guests were part of the experience across the five seperate 50-minute performances.