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The Coffee has Faded, because the Ice has Melted (2019)
Café do Brasil stimulates Archive of People to re-imagine the essence of collectiveness, and open up conversation among the collective members via e-meetings.
Fragmented thoughts travel through Brazil, coffee, public space, social movement, togetherness and time, which then extend to personal memories and feelings. Sitting in Café do Brasil, one may feel a sense of being elevated, with people inside and the harbour outside, a glass window separates the two, as if the flow of the outside world is slowing down.
The elevated platform in the exhibition allows things to settle and others to get afloat, like a delicate layer of dense milk frothing over the coffee. A few sips of milk-flavoured air are taken before exploring the differences in the extracted coffee. In order to find a balance between the differences, Archive of People offers a special blend of coffee beans as a kind of spiritual bonding within the organisation. Members will each choose a particular type of coffee bean, blend it in different proportions, and have a coffee tasting session.
It takes time for the iced coffee to drip, and the barista, with his back to the platform, says: “Good things come in small steps, everything in its own pace.
“The coffee has faded because the ice has melted.” She tells us slowly.
The coffee has never changed in composition, so it’s only natural that the flavour fade, but it has finally become a cup of iced coffee that is difficult to talk about properly. Is it complicated by the fact that the ice is made up of water?
The ice-maker asks, “Does the coffee taste less pure when ice is added?”
Did it taste worse? And then she sings, “It goes bad, it’s not a big deal.”
Right on. It’s the most important to fix the broken. There are people in the world who say they are broken, and there are people who say the system is torn. Maybe this elevated platform will be a little buffer zone for us to regroup in a coffee break.
The coffee observer pauses to listen to the cracking sound in the ice, to watch the dripping of ice water, the constant transformation of liquid to ice then eventually back to liquid, over and over again, it runs through the mouth and then into the rest.
