From the family refrigerator to the global food system
A co-production by Images Vevey and the Alimentarium.
Ice Box © Tokuko Ushioda, courtesy the artist / PGI
A refrigerator may seem very small in comparison to the global food system. Yet it offers one of its most intimate portraits. Between 1981 and 1995, Japanese photographer Tokuko Ushioda opened the doors of sixty refrigerators in Tokyo households. Carefully arranged products, leftovers, packaging, and children’s drawings reveal the tastes, habits, and relationships that connect the people living under the same roof. Each refrigerator thus becomes a family portrait and a witness to its time.
Co-produced by Images Vevey and the Alimentarium, the installation ICE BOX creates a journey between Quai Perdonnet and the museum. It connects the domestic sphere to the broader questions explored in the exhibition “SYSTEMA ALIMENTARIUM. Towards a Major Food Revolution?” Behind the contents of a refrigerator lies an entire system: what we choose to eat, how food is produced, processed, preserved, and distributed, as well as what we share, forget, or throw away.
The exhibition at the Alimentarium extends this investigation by shifting scale. Around fifty photographs by members of the Magnum Photos agency, including Paolo Pellegrin, Newsha Tavakolian, and Jonas Bendiksen, document the human realities that shape the journey of food from field to plate. Among them, Pat Gormans Pie Factory, Bloxwich, Walsall, England, United Kingdom, 2011 by Martin Parr captures a moment in the food-processing chain. In the museum hall, the monumental photograph Untitled #1, The Prophecy by Fabrice Monteiro brings forth a warning figure amid a landfill, exposing the hidden side of our consumption.
The journey continues at WØFF, the Alimentarium’s café, with a series of photographic still lifes that question our relationship with time, food, and consumption. Works such as Cornichon by Louise Te Poele and Mc Do by Joachim Lapôtre are displayed alongside a sidewalk still by Charles Nègre.
Like Tokuko Ushioda’s refrigerator photographs, these images reveal the intimate perspective photographers bring to a familiar element of everyday life: food.
From a family refrigerator to the global food system, these photographs invite us to look differently at a simple daily act: opening a door and choosing what we are going to eat.