ARTISANAL CHEWING GUM FACTORY - Meet d3, Dubai, April 2015
For Meet d3, a festival to inaugurate the new Dubai Design District, Bompas & Parr designed a pop-up Artisanal Chewing Gum Factory installation, which stood proud at the centre of the festival, shooting pink plumes of smoke into the blue skies of Dubai.
To exalt and elevate the once-vilified medium of chewing gum to a state of high art and high design, Bompas & Parr designed a temporary factory, the locale for an inspiring, astounding, flavour-filled artisanal gum-making microcosm where 40,000 flavour combinations were available.
The factory experience took place across two rooms. Once inside the dark interior of the first room – the Flavour Library – visitors were invited to feast their nasal passageways on a fabulously intimidating 200 different flavours, split into Sweet, Fruity, Spicy and Savoury. From myrrh to green pepper, sweet mandarin, black truffle, prawn head, humid soil, turmeric and ripe banana, the variety – extracted and captured by different methods of maceration, distillation, expression and enfleurage – was vast and voluptuous.
Next, visitors chose two favourite flavours and posted their choices through the ‘flavour post box' before heading into the Making Room, flooded with pink light and a mist of icing sugar. Here, with comedy hairnets in place, visitors transformed their duet of flavours into colourful, chewable, unique personalised gum pieces. Whoever thought a non-digestible, non-nutritive masticatory product could be so entertaining…?
Photography by Restronaut and Malcom Eisele.