VIZIO SINTETICO (Synthetic Vice)

VIZIO SINTETICO
Formafantasma / Oniricalab / Tastefull

Tastefull is the name of the workshop organized by Studio Formafantasma and OniricaLab in Verona

on Novermber 2011.
The focus of this one week workshop has been food and edible materials and their relationship with design. The workshop was attended by 15 designers, cooks and students from universities and Art Accademies, coming from all over Italy and personally selected by Formafantasma.
This workshop pushed the participants to overcome the conceptual barriers about food, to explore new ways

of using and discover more complex chemical and dreamy combinations;

Together with Francesca Gattello and Gianmaria Citron, we focused on sugar and started experimenting with caramel: different recipies for different types of caramel, from the very soft and crystal clear one, to the vitreous brown-red one.

VIZIO SINTETICO (Synthetic Vice) is the name of the project i developed, starting from a reflection

on two very different types of sweetener, sugar on one side and Stevia on the other.

Stevia is a plant long used in Latin America and Japan for its high power, low-calorie sweetener,

a plant which has been banned for many years in the Weastern countries with no reason;

only recently the EU lifted the ban.

With this project I wanted to emphasize the contrast between these two elements,

and especially on the way each one of them is percived in the present and the way

they might be percived in the not far future.

What in the present is percived as good might be percived as evil in the future.

In a way it's what happened with sugar and stevia in these days.

With this in mind I assumed a new destiny for sugar, and i set "contrast" as the keyword:

natural / synthetic, black / white, healthy / vicious, legal / illegal.

I wanted this project to show an alternative scenario, a vision of the future between utopia and reality

that here i propose in order to increase the discourse and force people to think about what is happening

and make their own opinions.

The project foresees the decay of sugar as the main sweetener in favour of stevia

(which is not illegal anymore); sugar becomes a new luxury product that, as cigars,

will be consumed by a few people aware of its unhealtyness, hedonist lovers of the old fashion sweetener.

In the final product sugar is crafted as a black crystal to produce highly aesthetic abstract and geometric shapes, which contrast with the simple leaves of the stevia plant.