100 years of world cuisine

Posted by Fabio 11 May 2011

Visualizing 38 million deaths from 25 conflicts. Ten casualties. Ten million casualties. Our understanding of conflicts is often nothing more than a handful of digits, the more precise, the less meaningful. The anchor’s tone remains the same when talking about major wars or isolated outbursts of violence. The horror lays hidden beneath the rigidity of numbers. Figures give us knowledge, not meaning. Clara Kayser-Bril, Nicolas Kayser-Bril and Marion Kotlarsk wanted to put a picture on these digits. A shocking, gory picture, like the reality of war. They wanted to give context, like a scale on which they could visualize each conflict next to the others.

“We’re not historians and our choices were, in part, left to our own judgement. It is obviously impossible to display all conflicts. It is also impossible to agree on when or where a conflict starts and ends. Focusing on the death toll should not take our minds away from those who survived through mutilation, exile or rape. This project remains artistic in scope and does not aim at scientificity. It sheds another light and, perhaps, restores meaning.”

www.100yearsofworldcuisine.com