A TROPHY TO BE BURNED
Product
Commissioned by FORK for the EFOOD24 awards, the piece reflects on fire as one of the most fundamental technologies in the history of food. Fire transforms, gathers and gives meaning to cooking, yet it leaves no trace of the process itself. The project embraces this paradox by creating an award that completes its life cycle through combustion.
Awards traditionally celebrate permanence. They accumulate, endure, and remain as symbols of achievement. This project questions that logic by proposing an alternative gesture: a trophy designed to disappear. The object takes the form of a vertical wooden structure composed of interlocking cherry wood profiles. Its geometry references the stacked sticks used to ignite a fire — a fragile equilibrium waiting to become transformation. The absence of screws, nails or metal joints reinforces a single-material logic in which the object can fully return to the cycle it evokes.
Engraved on one of the vertical elements appears the message:
“A trophy to be burned. A tribute to fire’s enduring role in food. A torch igniting without waste.”
The piece operates simultaneously as object and ritual. Rather than preserving the memory of an achievement through permanence, the trophy invites its recipients to conclude the cycle by transforming it into flame. Recognition becomes an ephemeral act, and celebration becomes a moment of transformation rather than accumulation.
The project was developed independently, from concept and fabrication to photography.