COMPOS-TABLE EDEN
A garden desk and a dining -compost- table
Let start with the Eden, the garden desk. Its top and drawers are transparent to allow a good lighting for the plants (here, potatoes) inside the desk. Plants received nutrients and water through an aeroponic system: A bike pump (A), activated by a nervous student, bubbles air through an aquarium stone (B) inside a bottle (C) containing water and compost tea. The air saturated with water and nutrients is distributed among drawers (D) to feed the plants in the drawers (D). Compost tea is produced in the Compstable.
COMPOS-TABLE EDEN-PART 2
AÂ dining -compost-Â table
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ComposTable is a kit easy to pack and assemble. Hard wood (purple heart, mahogany, chestnut, red oak, birch) small squared pieces and small plastic bottles are assembled using chestnut dowels to support a thermoformed plastic container covered by a transparent plastic sheet. The liquid produced during composting flows from the plastic container collector to Eden desk through a plastic tube ended by a spigot.
After having dinner, the viewer can remove the ComposTable transparent top, pour leftover food and the water (half a glass) used to wash dishes into the table top plastic container, and add a table spoon of bokashi (a mix of micro-organisms) over the food to avoid any smell, and put the top back. While eating, viewer can see multicolored molds and microorganisms decomposing/digesting the food the viewer himself or another human ate before. It is a perturbing experience, an evocation of decay and death. On the one hand, ComposTable is a still life but on the other hand, compost teas are drained from the table, allowing living vegetables to be cultivated in the Eden desk.