Polycake N°5

This is more than a one-off cake stand.
Polycake N°5 is a part of the "Polycreative" project lead by Orlando Lovell. A creative relationship between multiple people that goes beyond a single outcome.
As today’s relationships, romantic and otherwise, are changing with the increased visibility and information access through social media platforms, so too are collaborations. "Polycreative" proposes a rethinking of the term collaboration as a “creative relationship”. Viewing a collaboration as a creative relationship means consent, appreciation, curiosity and dialogue can be shared under a new light.

Orlando LOVELL :
"The story behind these cake stands is that I asked my friend Matylda Krzykowski for a recommendation for the project. She gave me the name of the Swiss designer and blacksmith Bertille Laguet. Like with a blind date, I checked her (work) out on the internet, and then just wrote to her with no great expectations. To my surprise she replied and told me that her grandfather was a pastry chef and her great-uncle was the White House pastry chef for 25 years. I was stunned by the immediate connection and we both quickly became enthusiastic about working together. The metal rounds of her triptych design were forged and hammered by hand in a repetitive body motion. There are stainless-steel plates on the tops and bottoms for food hygene. Each stand is stamped with both our names on the base. We talked about the cake mimicking the shape of the stand and I took a long time to find what I wanted to make, because I felt a great desire to do the stands justice and ended up hand-piping rings of coloured choux pastry. It took many tries to get them right and was the longest process and the most technically difficult of all the cakes in this project. I then passed on the image of the cakes and their stands, along with the story above, to the secondary designers Marie Caye and Arvid Jense who devised and scripted a performative social practice, which I then organised, directed and filmed in Berlin."

Arvid&Marie :
“We were inspired by the story of the stand designer who created the stand in repetitive motions. We wanted to create a ritual around the idea of manufacture/mass production. Both the cake and the stand are unique crafted objects can we standardize them? We tried to deconstruct the cake in single bites to be eaten in rhythm.”

Read more on:
Orlando Lovell, "polycreative" project
Arvid&Marie

DutchDesignWeek, Eindhoven, 2019
Master degree of Orlando Lovell, Eindhoven, 2019
Photo : Studio Christoph Sagel, Bertille Laguet