CAFETERIA ANDERSSON

A friend once phoned me and asked me to run her cafeteria for a week while she was on holiday.The cafeteria is situated on a small island called Seglinge in the finnish archipelago. It was the summer of 1993.I liked the idea of trying to serve people as well as possible, making them happy by doing something simple and nice, so I brought the cookbook and made cakes in the shape of triangels, circles and squares, colouring them in yellow, blue and red. They did not taste very good and when my cappuchinos didn't turn out that well either, I had to do a little dance and serv small pieces of my cakes to make the customers happy again. Most of the time I succeeded...

My first real attempt at turning the cafeteria idea into an exhibition took place in Jämsä, a small town in the centre of Finland, in the summer of 1994.

THE JÄMSÄ-CAFETERIA

Working togehter with a carpenter, Mika Ström, I made the Coffeelover's Supertable, a big table in a form resembling the famous Alvar Aalto vases. On the table were lots of things of great importance to the serious coffeedrinker. I designed the items as a collision between urban techno-culture and old finnish wood-craftsmanship. The stools were made to look like the cakes, with primary coloured plexiglass to sit on On the gallery-windows I painted insects on the gallery windows and there were finnish summer flowers all over the place.If you liked you could grind your own coffee and the coffee pot was always hot .

By this time you could also enjoy really good versions of my triangle-, circle- and square-shaped pastries made professionally after Tuija Sinisalo's recipe.

Outside I built the Finnish People's Coffee table together with another carpenter, Mikko Pitkäniemi. It resembled of traditional tables for big outdoor parties and took the shape of a big coffee cup. Many middleaged couples visiting the cafeteria wore tired looks on their faces at first but they cheered up when they got knives in their hands and were asked to make their own marks on the outdoor table.

COFFEE AND COMPUTERS

I decided to add the Clean/Puhdas/Ren-exhibition to the Cafeteria project since it belongs to my new, clean(!), non-alcoholic life style. In my search for new ways to get together with my friends, not wanting to spend so much time in pubs and restaurants anymore, the coffee culture turned out to be very important. In Finland we have a deeply rooted tradition of drinking alcohol culture and it is not so easy to live outside of it. But we also have long traditions of drinking coffee, so that is what I do nowadays.

The time and money I have saved have been used to update my knowledge of the computer culture, an area I swore I would never go into! And you really need coffee when you stay up all night trying to write these web-documents. I was not really satisfied with the first version of the Coffeelover's Supertable, so I let a big root grow up out of the surface where I hung one brazilian coffeebean. The flower pot grew further when I made a totally new glass vase together with glass designer Markku Salo.