40,000 flavour combinations

Dubai, 2015: For Meet d3, a festival to inaugurate the new Dubai Design District, Bompas & Parr designed a pop-up Artisanal Chewing Gum Factory. It stood at the centre of the festival, shooting pink plumes of smoke into the blue skies of Dubai.

To elevate the once-vilified medium of chewing gum to a state of high art, the studio conceived the installation as an inspiring, astounding, flavour-filled locale with 40,000 potential flavour combinations on offer.

Visitors' first stop was at the Flavour Library where they were invited to sample 200 different authentic flavours. Covering the realms of Sweet, Fruity, Spicy and Savoury, each flavour was extracted and captured by maceration, distillation, expression and enfleurage using authentic ingredients. From myrrh to green pepper, sweet mandarin, black truffle, prawn, soil, turmeric and ripe banana, the variety was vast and the potential combinations wondrously unpredictable.

Next, visitors chose two favourite flavours and headed into the Making Room, to transform their duet of flavours into colourful, chewable, uniquely personalised gum. Whoever thought a non-digestible, non-nutritional masticatory product could be so entertaining…?

Photography by Restronaut and Malcom Eisele.