The traditional Western layout of the dinner table remains iconic and comforting, even as our taste in tableware has changed and designers of such objects have kept innovating. Though there have been many creative conceptual designs for dinner tables, few actually eschew functionality. Fasted, a piece created by the French designer team Studio Dessuant Bone, is of the bolder sort of design, reducing the table set to a bare wire schematic in response to a prompt from DWA Studio.
In Fasted, the table set is reduced to the barest iconography. Two spoons become circles on sticks and a knife becomes a triangle connected to a line. The pitcher and glass, depending on how you look at them, may only appear to be three-dimensional; though the top and bottom are round, they are only connected by single wires that don't exactly suggest roundness in the body of the bottle. A round gold 'frame' offsets this exercise in blue.
Fasted made its debut at DWA's exhibit 'A Stomaco Vuoto' ('On an Empty Stomach') in April in Milan. The theme of the exhibition, appropriately, was fasting, a stark contrast to the recent Milan EXPO 2015's theme of food.
"On an Empty Stomach does not only allude to a lack of food, it is actually a metaphor for emptiness. It refers to any kind of absence and fasting, to detraction, change and regeneration," reads the exhibit's manifesto by organizer Linda Ronzoni.
"It is a call for... freeing yourself from the superfluous, and for pursuing the essence... of all things. In the days of food, news and virtual connection bulimia, in the days of overfed and starving people, and of those who can choose to have an empty stomach."
Whatever your feelings about these issues, it is impressive that the exhibit encouraged viewers to seriously consider such a wide range of issues while viewing such striking work.