WIEKI SOMERS
Chocolate Mill

Studio Wieki Somers teamed up with chocolatier Rafael Mutter to create the ‘CHOCOLATE MILL’, a large cylindrical block of chocolate from which delicate rosettes can be shaved off with a crank-turned blade. Various patterns are integrated into the block using different types of chocolate, creating a flipbook effect as the layers are scraped off.

During their performance at June 15 in the summer exhibition ‘Gerrit Rietveld – The Revolution of Space’, a special exhibition under the title ‘Confrontations’ opened during Art Basel at the Vitra Design Museum, Studio Wieki Somers and the chocolatier prepared chilled drinks for visitors using the chocolate rosettes. Small chocolate mills are on sale in the Vitra shop, including special chocolate for refilling.

Making chocolate out of cocoa beans is a labour-intensive process. But once transformed into chocolate mass, the possibilities seem endless. The fluid mass of chocolate solidifying into different forms is a fascinating process, how it can break and melt again. Nowadays production possibilities can produce new forms of chocolate bars and bonbons by printing, milling, extruding, dripping and spinning chocolate. Solidified sediments, left overs of these processes, can become new chocolates.

We have created a device, a chocolate carrousel, by adapting a machine used mainly in Switzerland as a cheese slicer. We use it in a different way, as an instrument that mediates between us and the chocolate. We also designed the chocolate which the machine processes, by inserting memories into it like fossils. Thus the three-dimensional aspect of the carrousel is extended by a fourth: time and history translated through movement. By rotating the carrousel's arm, one image appears while another fades away. – Studio Wieki Somers