Space is the Taste - The Ephemeral Projection of Food Consumption in Extra-Terrestrial Dimensions
Advocating for the need of experiencing new extra-terrestrial dimensions of life, creative duo RGB-inominal portrays a fantasy Cyber world where food and taste are ephemeral projections of thoughts and feelings.
“Wanting to be Marlon Brando is vanity. After all, even Marlon Brando is an epiphenomenon,” wittily states Michel Piccoli in Marco Ferreri’s La Grande Bouffe (The Great Feast), the 1973 Italo-French masterpiece where the four friends eat themselves to death to hyperbolically signify capitalism. In recent years, on the contrary, we have been witnessing the capitalistic media industry using culinary culture in a bulimic attempt to generate questionable entertainment. The result, 15 years on from the first airing of a revamped Masterchef, is the impression that food itself has gone from being a material good to an epiphenomenon.
What if in the near future, then, food and therefore taste will only be a mental concept, a voluptuous and ephemeral projection of taste over physical substance? This is what creative duo RGB-inominal has envisioned and investigated. Hailing from Rome, for sure one of the hotbeds of European cuisine, RGB-inominal is composed of Rebecca Panella and Giulia Copelli, tow-up-and-coming photographers and art directors currently attending a fashion communication degree at the city’s prestigious Accademia di Costume e Moda.
Their latest project Sapori Proiettati (Projected Tastes) is a video, photographic and conceptual effort revolving around the thought of alien life as a necessary condition of contemporary humans and the consequent nutritional sensations perceived. “Teleported into something distant, absent, and profoundly unknown, [we feel] the vacillating uncertainty of our lives, almost ephemeral, but constantly changing,” that’s the sensation evoked by the conceptual photo series conceived by RGB-inominal.
Nodding to a digital and futuristic dimension in their name - RGB, the colour model used for digital outputs, in opposition to CYMK, that used for physical printing - Giulia and Rebecca’s vision of the future and its food consumption takes shape through three mutant figures stylistically influenced by mid-century Sci-Fi fictional representations of Venusians and Martians. Clad by a shroud of purposely staged plastic aesthetics in the style of Nadia Lee Cohen’s Hollywood women, RGB-inominal alien girls glamorously feast on slimy fluorescent food, which turns out to be the projection of their own bodies and thoughts.
Nonetheless influenced by the early 2000s revamp of the Space-Age trend generated by the dystopic enthusiasm ignited by Cyber culture; the project not only marks the renewed appeal of Cyber style in the contemporary art world, but also suggests the urge of the youth in finding new answers and interpretations to the increasing digitalisation of their lives.
“We just have to live another time,” says the duo, suggesting that new approaches to life are now necessary. A new world advocates to be built, a new life to be lived.
Has the time come for a new Space Age? Is taste an epiphenomenon? Is it just an extra-dimensional projection of our feelings? Maybe that’s the reason why the characters of La Grande Bouffe aspired to leave terrestrial and material life through the consumption of food. Maybe, the answer lies in this photo series.
Creative direction & Videomaking: Giulia Copelli
Art direction & Photography: Rebecca Panella
Backgrounds: Neil Limoraj
Make-up: Martina Di Cori
Hair: Federico Rossi
Music production & Composing by Max Benassi
Video wording: Solecuoremetadone
Models: Fabrizia D’Avanzo; Giorgia D’Avanzo; Ludovica Lovati