If when we all die, nothing else is left? Only our noodles and our objects instead?
When instant noodles were first invented by Taiwanese-Japanese inventor Momofuku Ando in Japan sometime around 1958, he might not have seen how much of an impact his invention would make to the lifestyle of the global civilization. Pouring hot water into a dried up noodle block was once a crazy idea, but not so crazy anymore, as it has become a representational icon for our rapid consuming lifestyle.
With the invention of the internet and the social media, our need for instant gratification has fiercely multiplied, into a need that seems to be inherited in us, ultimately taking over every aspect of our life. This may seem like an inevitable reality, as our world moves forward everyday, forging us with more and more things that were once impossible; but among us are people that still recognizes the need to slow down, and one of them is this young Indonesian artist, Cynthia Delaney Suwito.
Suwito has been playing around with the ideas of time and daily rituals in her artworks, where she continuously tries to use these concepts to highlight the backlash of our complicated city systems. She sees the importance of slowing down in this fast pace society, because she realizes that when people perform tasks under these city systems, consciousness is being eroded away.
In her project of ‘Knitting Noodles‘, we can see how her clever idea successfully highlights her statement, where she not only slows down the initial ability of the instant noodle but also slows down the already slow process of knitting. This symbolic action she has decided to use creates a progress as well as a result that demands the viewers to slow down. With a twist of humor and a strong focus on the viewers’ experience, she has also created other instant noodles related works including the ‘Noodle Confessions’ and ‘Instant Noodles – Specimen’ collection, where she again uses the instant noodle symbolically to highlight and simplify the complex concepts of time and culture.
