what he made of it,” she says. “I gave him the book and told him: ‘Do whatever! As long as it’s reducing meat in some way, go for it.’ And he made a smoked apple and pork skin sausage, and a heart and tongue sausage. They were both delicious. Even the fruit salami that he made was really good.” This is the sort of impact Niebling values the most: for her ideas to be taken up by specialists and artisans themselves. “That’s much more important than to have a sausage with my name on it,” she says. I have managed to catch Niebling at an unusually hectic time in her life. She is in the middle of her move to Zurich, and is also in the final stages of preparing for her wedding. When we meet at the market, she has recently returned from Hyères, where she sat on the jury for this year’s Grand Prix and also presented the first fruits of a new project centred around seaweed, developed as part of the two residencies the Grand Prix winner undertakes as part of their prize: one for the historic French porcelain manufacturer Sèvres, and another for the glass-making centre CIRVA in Marseilles. These residencies were a challenge for a designer who prefers to delve deeply into the material properties of her subject before thinking about aesthetic applications. “I had to do a vase [for CIRVA], so I thought, ‘Water plant vase!’” says Niebling. “And for Sèvres, they asked me to do something decorative, like tiles. But I was a bit stubborn and made them a plate. I thought, OK, decorative – why don’t I look at the aesthetics of seaweed, because it’s so beautiful.” The resultant CIRVA vases are jar-like, with subtly coloured gradients – blue, ochre, mint green – at their bases and narrowing brims, the shape of each adapted for a specific type of aquatic plant, ranging from waterlilies, which need tall vases, to micro-plants such as fanwort and duckweed, for which smaller vessels suffice. The Sèvres plates also drew on the material properties of aquatic plants by moulding rehydrated supermarket-bought seaweed to form textured patterns on top of each plate. “I thought it was a bit funny, because the seaweed is plated on the plate,” says Niebling. “But I was also surprised at the beauty of it. Sèvres porcelain is super precise and loyal to the seaweed’s shape. You see all the bubbles and every type of wrinkle. Dulse seaweed, for instance, has tiny little leaves that are about 2mm, and you can actually see them [on the plate].” The process of designing the objects for CIRVA and Sèvres clearly yielded interesting insights into the characteristics and properties of different types of aquatic plants. However, there is one particular aspect of seaweed that Niebling is looking to focus on when continuing her development of the project. “The branches of seaweed can grow in any direction, and because of the waves they need a thickening agent: their cells contain a little gel to prevent them from tearing. None of our air plants have these properties,” she explains. This is something Niebling discovered while working on The Sausage of the Future: sausages need a binding agent such as starch, blood, eggs or gelatin to stay compact, and seaweed could potentially be processed into a sustainable glue substitute. I ask Niebling what format her seaweed project will eventually take, and she laughs. “Well, my boyfriend begged me not to do a book again. It’s really, really
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“I should’ve made a sausage with my own blood and cured it with my sweat.”