By Tamar Baumgarten-Noort. The Orange is a proud fruit. It doesn't merely roll around, it revolves around itself in fancy pirouettes. The doughnuts on the other hand are much more cumbersome. They lack any elegance; they rather crawl over the screen. When the sausages come, it's time to get excited. Niina Suominen directs food as if they were celebrities making a big entrance. You might wanna applaude, when the kiwi is exploding or the cake turns to sludge. The hustling and bustling feels like a carnival show, like a final unrestrained pleasure, until the bulldozers come and the stars once again have to transform to dated foodstuff.

Breathing life into inanimate objects for art's sake was a speciality of Fischli & Weiss – the Swiss duo reveals the secret life of objects by starting a process, which when provided with an energy input of minute planning will again and again re-animate matter. The energy is transported on to set matter in motion without in principle changing the nature of the object.

Niina Suominen's film puts its focus on the conflict between energy and matter. But she's not interested in the movement of matter per se – as she brings that about herself in this animation short – but in the question of how surface and texture change by this input of energy. She transforms her food into animated matter in order to change our perception. While up until now we may have viewed kiwis as providers of Vitamin C and doughnuts as fattening food, GOOD STUFF departs from this clichés to open up new ways of understanding. Colours become important, shapes and surfaces change. By assigning the different foodstuff certain roles that distinguish them dramatically from their categorisation as pure aliments, she forces us to change our perspective and by doing so cleverly reminds us of the heaps of food that is thrown away every day, spat out by the affluent societies. The film might touch on latent feelings of guilt – but it is never moralizing and never becomes a cautionary tale. For this the dance of the kiwi and her friends is just too damn entertaining.

Links

• GOOD STUFF (FIN 2009. Niina Suominen)
• An Enjoyable Piece of Work – An interview with Niina Suominen
• 103 Years of Finnish Cinema – Cornelis Hähnel about the Finnish film market