RAT supper club: The Living Symbiosis at Vienna Design Week

For the concurrent editions of VIENNA DESIGN WEEK and Vienna Food Future Week, Berlin-based food design studio RAT supper club presents THE LIVING SYMBIOSIS, a radical culinary installation that blurs the boundaries between edible matter, bio-material architecture, and environmental speculation. Hosted by The Social Hub, the performative exhibition anchors itself in the spatial philosophy of Austrian icon Friedensreich Hundertwasser. Deliberately stripping away his famously vibrant color palettes, the installation draws its primary inspiration from his Mould Manifesto , which advocated for the organic takeover of rigid, straight lines by natural growth, fungi, and decay. What to expect? Fully vegetarian menu* Open bar Live DJ Agenda 19.00: Doors open 19.30: Welcome by RAT & flexi studio 22.30: Ends The Spatial Experience: A Bio-Material Topography In collaboration with bio-material researchers Flexi Studio, the traditional dining table has been entirely eradicated. In its place sits a massive, undulating white monolith. Built without a single straight edge, this stark, all-white landscape serves as the physical topography of the event. Guests are invited to physically inhabit the space, foraging and interacting with a monochromatic foodscape that is seamlessly integrated into the structural bio-materials, blurring the line between physical architecture and edible consumption. The Fading of Nature: The white installation acts as a literal and figurative fossil record. As climate change accelerates, rising global temperatures actively suppress natural plant pigments, while the industrial shift toward high-yield monocultures systematically eradicates agrobiodiversity. The result is a literal "bleaching" of our food systems, akin to coral bleaching. The edible architectures presented in the installation act as a speculative archive, representing crops and organic shapes that have lost their natural pigmentation to environmental degradation. The Sensory Reset: In the modern food industry, color is continuously weaponized. From farmed salmon artificially dyed orange to the heavy reliance on synthetic colorants in supermarkets, visual marketing dictates flavor expectations before food ever reaches the palate. By presenting an entirely tabula rasa foodscape, RAT strips away this visual deception. Guests are forced into a blind state, relying purely on bottom-up sensory data - taste, texture, temperature, and form - challenging the brain’s predictive coding and offering a genuine sensory reset.