LETTER_1: LEMNISCATE KITCHEN

Mood: Feeling of Rejection
Activity: Food storage and cook
Real place: Vending machines office corridor
Fictitious place: Kitchen
Collision:
- Industrial food vs Haute Cuisine
- Vending machines Vs Three Stars Basque Restaurants
- Impersonal Office Space Vs Personal Domestic Space
Parallels:
- Office monotony Vs Kitchen everyday repetitiveness
- Vending machine snacks Vs Pre-cooked domestic food
- Industrial food chain Vs Kitchen furniture industrial production


Narrative: Feeling of Rejection in the Office Corridor

It it six o'clock in the evening and apparently most of the employees have already left the building after the hustle and bustle of the last twenty minutes. The floor 23 seems to be calm but Nora has to be careful not to commit any mistake. After approaching her ear to the door and having a stealthy look at the corridor she decides to buy some food in the vending machines.

The corridor of the floor is the stereotype of a 1980's boring and impersonal shabby office building. It is long, narrow and repetitive. Grey flecked carpeted flooring, beige and white modular false ceiling with fluorescent lamps and pale coloured walls. Actually, the corridor is circular and it is rounding the central core of staircases, service rooms and lifts. Against this wall are located the vending machines while the front wall, from which she has got into the corridor is full of doors. The corridor is so standard that you could be in any office building of any city in the world without being possible to identify it.

Nora is not very hungry but nonetheless she has to take advantage of her aloneness at night to get some provisions. With evident apathy she starts checking up the food from one vending machine to the other but all she finds is so dreadful, unhealthy and artificial that she turns around the circular corridor over and over with the naïve hope of coming across suddenly with a better option. She is getting dizzy and the machines and doors of the corridor seem to be growing in number with each new loop. Under a strong feeling of rejection for the terrible food options she starts making extremely unfair and outrageous comparisons between London office fast food habits and Basque cuisine culture. In a delirium between the hideous din of tacky coloured packs of precooked products and the “haute cuisine” tradition of Basque grand restaurants, she starts to imagine how to narrate to her father that corridor, her new eating habits and the absolute feeling of rejection while pretending not to worry him too much.