FLOATING PICNIC
Platform for a Global Balanced Diet
Developed by Ianthe Jackson and Pauline Marcelle

Dumbo Art Center, New York, 2007
Floating picnic asks the viewer to reconsider their landscape and access to waterways in NYC as well as other parts of the world, since they are forms of travel and connectors of landmasses; we are providing a stationary platform for a leisure activity within the context of food.
Within urban environments we are often unaware of the possibilities of land and water use. Though we are corralled through sidewalks, subway routes, and car paths, people often are unaware of streets and the open air specifically when transportation only consists of an underground movement. Floating picnic reveals a new possibility of existing in this space, and more than anything, a possibility of change in a dietary perception.
The act of taking in food is the most common universal human experience. During the past decades, citizens of planet earth spent over billions of resources on a daily basis with spectacular routines preparing and providing sources of energy and nutrition, setting the living platform in turmoil of starvation and dehydration, unaware of reparation, its consequences and side effects.
Ventilation has been distilled and transpired into survival of an insecure refuge and the affliction of long term and generic habits have created a non-regulated fashion to achieve short term objectives towards supporting normal growth and development.
The effects of yo-yo dispositions on fluid grounds show the results much too often in low metabolism and ineffective methods alternating prolonged periods of feast and famine. The commonality through food and water intake conjointly brings a diversity of humans with their different customs and cultures, thus creating universal spectacles along their diverse continental journeys and search for a global balanced diet.
The determination of one’s physical and geographical position stimulates and compels the usage of transportation to seek nutrition through distribution networks such as water, land and airways. Waterways are the neutral zone between places of conflicting viewpoints and connect pieces of land, transporting people and goods through its natural movement. The correlation by water and air enables mobility and orientation, aspects associating to the nomadic properties within one’s very own environment.
This survival mechanism of security and apprehension refers to cases of widespread deprivation among populations, usually due to poverty, political conflicts or instability. At the other end of the spectrum, solution by change of ideologies of a settled inclination and the so called “free trade” continuously affects our mental nutrition.