Pasta Shootah

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PASTA SHOOTAH

In the global imagination, Italy means pasta and vice versa. The cliché, captured in “Mangiapasta” and other epithets (not always complimentary), transforms the country’s eating habits into the main characteristic of the people, fueling the stereotype of Italian identity. Not all Italians accepted this fate: in 1930, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti declared in the Manifesto of Futurist Cooking that it was time to abolish pasta as a symbol of the nation, an absurd gastronomic religion, which made people lazy and heavy and unprepared for an increasingly mobile and fast-paced life. Nevertheless, nothing has changed.

Food culture has stagnated in Italy, a country that freezes tradition through conservation and idealises the normal. If pasta is a symbol of being Italian, how can design be used to question its deep-rooted conventions? How do new methodologies, 3d softwares and new materials connect to a national heritage in which food, industry, and politics have always had a complex relationship? And what future possibilities do they reveal?

This project appropriates pasta as a primary source, beyond its culinary origins, to explore technology and making in a cultural context. By translating extrusion from the main method of pasta production to 3D softwares, new rules emerge for efficiency, form, scale, and process. This experimentation is an opportunity to create anew in a medium that is over 1,000 years old.