A Sensory Echo of Wartime Resilience
Food In Wartime
Client
Verzets Museum
Concept & Design
Tjep.
Concept & Content
Studio Louter
Design Team
Frank Tjepkema, Héloïse Leveque
Production
Fiction Factory
Year
2017
Bridging Scarcity and Superfoods in a Museum of Memory
Envision a banquet where ration cards mingle with modern kale smoothies—a poignant tableau that stirs the palate and the soul, revealing how wartime ingenuity birthed today's wellness obsessions. Eten in Oorlogstijd, a collaborative installation by Studio Louter and Tjep. unveiled at Amsterdam's Verzetsmuseum in 2016, weaves the stark realities of World War II Dutch cuisine into a vibrant narrative of adaptation, running until May 28, 2017, and inviting visitors to taste the threads connecting yesterday's hunger to tomorrow's harvest.
Spatial Alchemy: Frank Tjepkema's Canvas of Constraint
Crafted under Frank Tjepkema's spatial vision, the exhibition transforms the museum's galleries into an immersive diorama of deprivation and defiance, where rationed potatoes and tulip bulbs stand sentinel alongside contemporary superfoods, their forms distilled into evocative silhouettes that blur the line between relic and revelation. Tjep.'s design philosophy—rooted in provocative minimalism—elevates everyday artifacts like bonkaarten and ersatz recipes into sculptural poetry, guiding visitors through a labyrinth of light and shadow that mirrors the moral ambiguities of occupation-era choices.
Culinary Confessions: Chefs Reckon with the Past
At the heart pulses a series of five intimate films by Studio Louter, where acclaimed Dutch chefs—icons of today's gastronomic scene—recreate wartime dishes from scarce wartime staples, their knives slicing through history as they navigate the ethics of substitution and survival. These cinematic vignettes, directed with unflinching tenderness, pair with interactive touchpoints that let guests experiment with ersatz ingredients, uncovering how the Hongerwinter's desperation forged the seeds of sustainable eating, all while echoing the museum's core tales of resistance and resilience.
A Catalog of Continuity: Recipes Reimagined
Complementing the spatial drama, Studio Louter's bespoke catalog—illustrated and designed in-house—serves as a portable heirloom, compiling those chef-driven recipes alongside wartime ephemera, from Voedingsraad pamphlets to underground bonnen trades, inviting home cooks to bridge eras with a single, sobering simmer. This tactile extension ensures the exhibition's lessons linger, much like the faint flavor of dock leaf tea on the tongue.
Tjep.'s Provocative Palate in Historical Harmony
More than an exhibit, Eten in Oorlogstijd is Tjep.'s ironic feast for the mind: a fusion of Louter's narrative finesse and our signature spatial provocation, echoing the self-sufficient ethos of the Oogst series while challenging visitors to confront abundance through the lens of austerity. In a world still grappling with scarcity, it whispers that true resistance begins at the table—where flavor forges fortitude.
Savoring Survival, One Ration at a Time
Evocative yet edible, it proves one meal's memory can nourish generations. Explore more of Tjep.'s narrative-driven designs on Tjep.com, where we plate the past to feed the future.