Say Cheese!

Location: New Hampshire, USA

The project poses as a gateway to the World Fellowship Centre, an existing retreat surrounded by the White Mountains of New Hampshire. The project bridges between the existing and pre-existing, seeking to re-instate the organization’s center of gravity through a choreographed cheese-making process (also imbedded in the organization’s past), in an attempt to forge comfort from memory, community and labor. The project is primarily loyal to the process it inhabits, with the aim of preserving the comfort of the process and by extension, the bodies involved in the process and/or produced as a result. These bodies are often mismatched in terms of conditioning requirements, wherein one body requires active conditioning and the other requires passive intervention within the same space, with the structure acting as the middleman. Thermal and social comfort are defined by these tensions, as the structure is in constant negotiation between different bodies it inhabits as well as the process it serves. Given the geographical context, the project seeks to extend the idyllic experiences promoted by the WFC, but it also provides a secluded, orchestrated space crucial for the manufacture, ageing and appreciation of cheese.