text by Irma Driessen

‘The quantity of energy that the sun sends to the earth in a single hour is sufficient to provide the whole of humanity with enough energy for an entire year: a modest 150 billion kWh,’ I read in a newspaper (Trouw, 26 March 2013). That sounds promising. Every hour! The problem is harvesting that energy. We are glad if every now and then scientists manage to scrape the yield of a solar cell up by a percent. Good news is no news.

Bartaku wanted to see if he could copy a solar cell using only natural elements. He did it. Ingredients is perhaps a better word, his solar cells are for eating. Aronia, the apple berry, is an important component, the berry’s pigment converts sunlight. Carbon, that keeps the intestines clean, functions as the conductor. Together with just a handful of other components they form small, stacked constructions, a kind of haute-designed-cuisine. Participants at the event are able to assemble the solar cells before eating them.

Bartaku is an artist who is devoted to words. Words steer thought. He is not very happy that his tasting has been announced as ‘e-tapas’. The name falls short. It is not about ‘e-tapas’. It isn’t even about food. ‘E-tapas are part of something bigger.’ That bigger story, that’s what it’s all about for him. To discover this, you need longer than the three minutes it takes to construct the tapa and pop it into your mouth. To be able to tell the bigger story, Bartaku organizes workshops, or perhaps lab is a better word. Lab assumes experiment, exchange of ideas, co-creation.

He is standing in the food lab in the Ketelhuis, sprinkling a whitish powder (‘agar’) into a red substance as he talks. He carefully weighs a few grams. He is making gelatine. With the trappings of an alchemist. Carole Collet stands next to him; she is making miniature electrodes from cooked strings of pasta, wound with wafer thin strips of edible silver. Flakes of silver stick to her fingers. She has to make 144, assistants help her. They are preparing the components so that the public only need assemble the solar cells later on (= stack the parts). Fast food.

With his research, Bartaku wants to question our attitudes to energy. Industry doesn’t do this, using terms like efficiency, yield, economy. This leaves little space for our fundamental relationship with the world around us, the connectivity of everything, big and small. We are energy, he says. Energy cannot disappear, only transform. The transformation is what it is all about. Participants at his event don’t just eat an exceptional tapa followed by a chocolate made by Amaro, washed down with Aronia wine or beer, as so called ‘Temporary photoElectric Digestopians’ they are part of the bigger picture, although this is mostly afterwards and really only when you talk to him.

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