The table as an element of proximity. SAWERDŌ (Bakery & Coffee) by BUREAU
27/11/2022.
[Geneva] Switzerland
metalocus, DILYANA DRAGOEVA
metalocus, DILYANA DRAGOEVA
Description of project by BUREAU
Two years of COVID-19 have pushed everyone to a certain level of distrust. We started the project of the Sawerdo with the fear that putting people around a table was an endangered gathering format. The risk was taken, a sort of hopeful leap of faith by the founders, believing that the jumping microbes of a too-close neighbour would never be an obstacle to being together.
Instead, a bet was taken on the opposite scenario: the one by which proximity is a simple vector towards spontaneous conversation and exchange well beyond the fear of a viral other.
Our project spatialised and constructed this “moment” of our lives and put everything and everyone around a staged and very material table.
Beyond the obvious references to traditional bread-making materials like marble and steel speed racks, the idea became quite simple: a hosting table allowing a variety of configurations. Somehow, the set is a half domestic, half professional one, between sharing “table d’hôtes” and dining in the interior of a bakery.
Jeff Wall's image Dressing Poultry (2007) was shot on a farm near Vancouver, celebrating a moment of fun while working – preparing what will become food. With an aesthetic at the antipodes of Sawerdo's project, this image has yet the same intention: to bring the act of cooking, nourishing, and sharing into a unifying whole of the living.
Like Jeff Wall's lightboxes, the Sawerdo had the chance to be in a very beautiful space that the project reveals as much as possible: an inhabited lightbox where scenes of life occur and will keep on happening as long as we understand that we are all biological beings or “viral others”.
Daniel Zamarbide has developed through the years a particular interest in the protean aspects of his discipline and nourishes his work and research through other domains like philosophy, applied and visual arts as well as cinema.
As a guest lecturer and jury he has been invited at a diversity of international schools and institutions to present and discuss his work and research.
Since 2003 his interest in research and education has led him to be invited as an assistant in the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and as a professor (2000-14) at the Haute École d’Art et de Design (HEAD) in Geneva. In 2014, he integrates the team of ALICE Lab (Dieter Dietz) at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) as a guest professor and research director.
In 2012, Daniel leaves group8 to start a new practice with Leopold Banchini, architect. Their practice, BUREAU A has explored during 5 years the possibilities of architectural making in a great variety of formats, opening the practice to work in the fields of art, garden and landscape architecture, exhibition design, temporary architecture and object making.
In 2017, following the dissolution of BUREAU A, Daniel Zamarbide pursues his more personal research interests under the name of BUREAU. This new entity produces architecture in the continuity of BUREAU A and incorporates to his already prolific activities furniture design (with a design brand of the same name) and an editorial project, which launches the first publication in June 2017.