EDIBLE EDEN.

Edible Eden is a project developed for the 100c Wastewater Bottle Art Exhibition at K11 Design Store in Hong Kong, where artists and designers were invited to transform a commercially available mineral water bottle. The project uses the bottle as a hydroponic container to grow a head of lettuce nourished with highly diluted doses of human urine.
The intervention operates through a deliberate ambiguity between object, installation, and advertisement. By reusing a branded water bottle as a cultivation device, Edible Eden subtly references the mythologies of purity, origin, and natural abundance commonly associated with bottled water, without explicitly citing any commercial brand.
Urine, typically framed as waste, is reintroduced as a nutrient resource. Used in homeopathic quantities, it functions as a fertilizer within a closed domestic-scale system. In doing so, the project makes visible the continuity between bodily processes, agricultural production, and consumption—challenging cultural taboos surrounding hygiene, value, and edibility.
Edible Eden is not conceived as a provocation for shock value, nor as a proposal for large-scale application. It operates instead as a precise epistemic gesture: a minimal system that collapses distinctions between waste and resource, nature and artifice, nourishment and rejection.

Expose - Edible Eden exposes the concealed nutrient cycles that underpin contemporary systems of food production and consumption. By bringing urine into the visible field of cultivation, the project reveals how cultural norms obscure the material continuity between bodies, resources, and ecosystems.
Exposure here is not explanatory but confrontational: the work places the viewer in direct contact with a process that is usually excluded from representation.

Mediate - The project mediates by transferring agricultural and biological knowledge into a domestic, legible format. Through a simple hydroponic setup, Edible Eden translates complex nutrient cycles into an accessible, if unsettling, material demonstration.
Mediation operates as a passage between scientific knowledge, everyday objects, and embodied experience, without neutralizing the discomfort inherent in the process.

Activate - Edible Eden activates reflection by inviting viewers to reconsider their relationship to waste, consumption, and fertility. Rather than instructing or prescribing behavior, the project activates awareness through direct material evidence.
Activation here is cognitive and bodily: the growing plant becomes a living indicator of a system that functions despite cultural resistance.

Edible Eden positions design as a tool for revealing uncomfortable continuities rather than resolving them.
By operating at the scale of a bottle and a plant, the project articulates a radical critique of purity, branding, and sustainability through a minimal, living system.