#phicentre

Comment tu t’es retrouvée impliquée dans In the Mouth? Quel est ton rôle sur le projet?

I came on board at the end of August as a replacement for the former project manager who had to withdraw from the project for personal reasons. 

In the context of this project I am the designated horticulturist. I am responsible for the planning, selection and assembly of the plant based displays conceived by the creative team. 

Qu’est-ce que tu as reçu comme commande de Nicolas Fonseca? Qu’est-ce que tu te rappelles de ta première rencontre avec lui.

"Make it weird!" Were some of the first words Nico said to me. 

I met him initially just prior to a general production meeting so I was meeting a lot of new people. He introduced himself with a big smile, and I didn’t know who he was so I asked him his role in the project. He told me, and the first thing I said was thank-you for the opportunity to be part of such an unusual project. In the mouth is bizarre and amazing on a lot of levels, and from a horticultural standpoint it is strange and very challenging. So I said “it’s going to be so fun making a hanging garden of moss balls I’ve never done that before. It takes plants from normal things we see every day, to something really weird" He said: "Yeah! Make it weird!” And that was it. The whole garden project for me synthesized in 3 words: "Make it weird!"

Quelle est la chose la plus inattendue que tu as eu à faire sur le projet?

I was having trouble finding nice specimens of Lemna gibba (common duckweed/lentilles d’eau) in nature locally, so I mail ordered a box of swamp water from Kingsville Ontario. It sat in the the post office for a whole weekend and when I opened it, it smelled and looked like something had died inside. Put a bag of water teeming with life in an anaerobic environment for a week and then open it up and take a sniff…in that moment you'll truly understand the meaning of the french expression “ouache." There were dead leeches and the water was almost opaque. I was afraid the specimens were ruined, but I put the contents of the bag in a bowl under an LED grow light and within 24 hours, the water had cleared and the odour had completely disappeared. I work with plants, so I know what they can do and I understand the mechanisms scientifically, but their ability to utterly transform filthy air and water into something pure and fresh still feels like a magic trick to me.

Comment le travail que tu fais pour In the Mouth s’inscrit-il dans ta démarche artisitque?

I’m not sure that I have an ‘artistic process’, but working with plants in 3-D space as I’ve had to do with the Kokedamas in the hanging garden is completely new for me and has really stimulated my imagination and truly changed the way I look at plants and their interactivity.

Qu’est-ce qui te procure le plus de plaisir à manger ou à cuisiner?

Cooking and eating is virtually all about smell and texture for me. In cooking it’s having your hands in the ingredients, and feeling the way they move between your fingers.

Some of my favourite things to eat actually have relatively bland taste on their own: hearts of palm, mushrooms, jujubes, meat jerky, dried fruit. I can eat these things until I’m stuffed and feel kind of sick because I am in love with their texture and the process of eating them. Smell is the exact opposite it can be wonderful and delicious but food smells can become too much if the odours are too strong or sustained. 

For me, memorable odours provoke nostalgia like no other sense. The smell of my mother’s fritatta or the cinnamon in her couscous or the lemon cake she’s made for me every day on my birthday for the last 30 years. The emotions and memories of food are in the smells and they are so vivid and complex and wonderful.

Texture is important and smell is very strong for me but each hits me in a different place sensorially. The texture of foods I feel in my body, the smell I feel in my heart. Cheesy but true.

En quelques mots, In the Mouth pour toi est…

A sensorial exploration of the confluence between sustenance, beauty and the human experience.