A Different Kind of Store

Be mindful of this art exhibit

If you're tired of feeling overloaded by our consumer culture, then this Danish exhibit is for you! On display in Copenhagen at the Danish FLOW Institute is a permanent installation that looks like a supermarket. Only visitors won't find food, toiletries or housewares on the shelves. Items like "half a minute with one another" and "clean tap water" are packaged in empty beverage cans, milk cartons and plastic bottles.

According to the institute, the lack of balance in our modern culture has brought about the necessity to consider growth in holistic and sustainable terms. The installation is geared at pointing out the need, in Western society, to get back to basics, to nature and to the self, as an individual and as part of the global community.

Walking into the "grocery store," visitors find metal shopping baskets to collect items that guarantee "unconditional love" and "one minute for reflection." Signs offering dozens of facts related to the individual, collective and environmental flow are positioned in the center of the room above refrigerated display cases just like a supermarket's, only their products are "clean air" and "flow."

A sign that reads "individual flow" relates to one's relationship to themself. Stating, "The constant accessibility by email, mobile phones, etc. causes a type of stress that doctors now refer to as 'always online syndrome'... at many fast-food restaurants, a single meal allots more than twice the recommended daily intake of fat, cholesterol, salt, and sugar... 50% of deaths in the world are related to diet, smoking and lack of physical activity."

The poster about "collective flow," or one's relationship with society, tells us that Western society constitutes 20% of the world population, but consumes 80% of its resources, and more that a billion people in the world earn less than a dollar a day. The poster of one's relationship to the environment states that if all of the households in China decided to buy refrigerators, there would not be enough metal in the world to manufacture them, and only 0.6 percent of the five trillion plastic bags manufactured worldwide in 2002 were recycled.