It is a show of creativity whose main aim was to honour the potato. The BULWA project was realised by students from the School of Form at SWPS University in Warsaw. They designed dishes intended for a specific potato-based dish. The designs were created under the direction of Arkadiusz Szwed and Maria Krześlak-Kandziora.
BULWA is a joint project by the School of Form at SWPS University, BioBazar and the Norblin Factory. Students were tasked with designing and making ceramic moulds in which various potato dishes could be served. In the process, they rediscovered the nature and significance of the tuber, which is a staple of the Polish table.
We wanted to move away completely from the traditional flat plate. To hide the potato somehow, to lift it, to pile it up, to present it in a completely unfamiliar way and thus to disenchant this most popular Polish agricultural product. We wanted to show it as a thing that, when placed on a pedestal, gains additional value in a display, ‘ explains Arkadiusz Szwed, a designer and head of the ceramics studio at the School of Form USWPS, who taught design classes with the students.
In addition to conducting design work, the young creatives reflected on the protagonist of the project – the potato. It is, as Maria Krześlak-Kandziora, a lecturer at the School of Form, wrote in the curatorial text, “an engaging and adventurous tale of advancement”. The potato came to us from Peru, where there is now a cryobank securing the genes of almost four thousand varieties of it. Before it found its way to the tables of the nobility and peasants in Europe, it was fed to pigs and soldiers. Today, it has lost its nimbus of exoticism, is witnessing a worsening climate crisis and NASA wants to cultivate it on Mars.
During the BULWA project, we tried to exploit these diverse perspectives. Not so much to reread the potato, but to remind us how much it means to Europeans, where it came from, how it is treated in the culture it comes from and what our common future is,’ emphasises Maria Krześlak-Kandziora.
Before starting their project work, the students were invited by BioBazar, which prepared a table for them with twenty different potato-based dishes. The table included well-known dishes such as Chips, potato pancakes or Silesian dumplings, as well as less popular ones, such as zaguby from Podlasie or the French gratin dauphinois. The dishes differed in consistency, firmness, taste and smell. In the next stage, students drew a dish to use as inspiration for the design of the display.
Some dishes were stiff, others soft, sticky, liquid. We worked in such a way as to capture the character of the dish and adapt to it,” says Arkadiusz Szwed.
The dishes were created from porcelain in several stages. Students first created designs for the objects, which they then realised using 3D technology or traditional modelling methods. Once the models were made, they prepared the dies from which the porcelain moulds were cast. Finally, the vessels were carefully cleaned and glazed.
The coolest thing about this project was that the students worked with one vegetable, but in many variations and drew out a lot of different insights. In fact, we are telling the story of the potato on the basis of 20 different porcelain objects that are completely different and work differently, ” concludes Arkadiusz Szwed.
source: SWPS University
photos: Arkadiusz Szwed, Jagoda Harton, Adam Biegała, Katarzyna Matosek, Yevgeniya Gudym / School of Form USWPS
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