Muscle and Pharynx

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Fabrics are worn next to our skin. We lay our bodies on softness. We put metal into our mouths. Our tongue feels food textures and we infinitely remember our hands' movement.

 

Muscle and Pharynx (2020-2022) is a commissioned work by a visual artist, Alisa Chunchue at SIWILAI City Club, the city club on the rooftop of the Central Embassy department store in Bangkok. As a site-responsive project, she combined the language of material, is interested in the coexistence of matter in the physical world, with the movement of the body while eating by focusing on the sense of touch and taste as the human’s physiological needs.
Muscle presents a movement of hands placed on the table and back muscles lying on a comfortable couch with a drawing of the digestive system printed on the couch cushions. Chunchue works with found objects in her house, such as rice grains, metal, and textiles, by reinventing them with handcrafted production. She switched between organic and inorganic compounds, creating imprints on the material. The visual elements of this work consist of textiles, jewelry, utensils, and bronze sculptures cast from her mouth and employed as tableware. Every process is handmade by her and craftswomen who carry on the craftmanship tradition and live in Bangkok.
Pharynx is composed of eight courses that represent the eight internal organs of the gastrointestinal system and the bodily fluids, starting with food ingestion in the mouth and ending with internal digestion. As a result, all food is reversed, bringing the internal organs outward. Reinterpret the menu by utilizing organ features and functions to bring customers the world beneath all eating processes through creative culinary.
Muscle and Pharynx has merged art into everyday life and invite the audience to drink in the sensual world in order to examine the entire background processes of consumption both in the material's production and the functioning of internal organs, together with our privacy and sociability through art and special dishes from the artist and the SIWILAI CITY CLUB co-created for this project.

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