This article is part of our Design special section about how food inspires designers to make and do surprising things.
Sonja Stummerer and Martin Hablesreiter have posed nude for photographs while sprawled amid spilled groceries. Garbed in evening wear or surgical scrubs, they have dragged shopping carts through pastures, dug appetizers out of topsoil and draped cucumber peels across their faces. While stomping vegetables underfoot at a barn, they have nibbled on Wiener schnitzel and nodded at each other across the table, in deadpan agreement that everything in the absurd scene tasted good.
Married artists and researchers based in Vienna, Ms. Stummerer and Mr. Hablesreiter run a company called honey & bunny. (It was founded two decades ago, without designating anyone a honey or a bunny.) Through performances, installations, lectures, workshops, films, photos and publications, they stir up questions about the rules and infrastructure that govern what we eat and how — and how our appetites can damage or benefit our bodies and the planet.
A recurring question in their work: “Is playing with your food actually immoral?”
From Cape Town to Brooklyn, they have dissected sandwiches with scalpels and handed out pickled vegetables as gaming pieces for rounds of bingo. Last week, a show of photos and videos of their recent mealtime experiments opened at the Austrian Cultural Forum in Rome (on view through July 18). And they are planning coming events, in Sweden, Germany and as far afield as China, that may call for descending into trenches to feast on edible soil.
During a series of video interviews, Ms. Stummerer described honey & bunny as always “open to being inspired,” even during everyday strolls through Viennese market stalls. When an idea springs to mind for adapting foodstuffs into educational public spectacles, one spouse is apt to turn to the other and say, in effect, “Isn’t that crazy? We could do that.”
The couple live and work in a 1910s apartment house on a quiet side street in northwest Vienna, adjoining hospital complexes. (The boxy cream-colored building’s other claim to fame is that belle époque clients of the artist Egon Schiele lived there.) They have crammed their storage crannies with props and costumes, including medical gear supplied by workers at nearby hospitals.
