20-02-2019

Dutch Design Daily

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Iris de Kievith & Annemarie Piscaer www.ser-vies.nl

SerVies

By 20-02-2019

Just imagine, tableware colored with Rotterdam fine particles. Would you dare to eat from it?

The Rotterdam air quality is not very good. Every day, we unwittingly inhale soot, nitrogen oxides and fine particles that we have produced ourselves. Architect Iris de Kievith and designer Annemarie Piscaer found a way to collect fine particles and use these as a glaze for ceramics. They used it to create a new kind of tableware (serVies). The color created by the fine particles makes the poor quality of the air visible.

In ten years’ time a resident of Rotterdam inhales about one gram of this particulate matter. That amount is used to color a cup or plate, equal to the amount an inhabitant of the city ingest in 25, 45, 65 or 85 years. The color gradient speaks for itself.

Part of the project is ‘participative mining’; you can participate in harvesting the fine particles. That is certainly also possible in other cities where the air quality should also be brought to the attention, in the Netherlands or abroad. Surely, the air cannot become clean in one single place as the wind blows soot in all directions. In this way, Annemarie and Iris hope to contribute to the fact that one day there will be no more fine particles to be harvested, and the tableware will have turned into a collector’s item from an insanely polluting era.