Sonja Stummerer and Martin Hablesreiter, delivered a provocative and playful performance that reframed food as one of the most overlooked yet powerful design disciplines. The duo, known as Honey & Bunny, have built their practice around interrogating the systems, practices and tools that shape how we eat.
Trained as architects, they shifted their focus to food design, asking a deceptively simple question: who designs what is on the plate? From this starting point, their work has evolved into a series of “eat art” performances that challenge the tools, environments and behaviours associated with consumption.
At Design Indaba, this approach took the form of a playful performance that disrupted familiar dining conventions. Through unusual setups they invited audiences to question why we eat the way we do and how these habits reinforce social structures and cultural norms.
Their work is intentionally eccentric, often humorous, and occasionally uncomfortable. Diners might eat kneeling, interact with suspended tables or encounter objects that blur the line between tool and provocation. These moments are not spectacle for its own sake but a method of creating awareness encouraging people to reconsider everything from the sustainability to the hierarchy embedded in everyday consumption.
Honey & Bunny position food as a designed system, a playful and provocative reminder that even the most routine human behaviours are constructed and therefore can be redesigned.
