New York has been considered from any number of perspectives over the years, but it’s safe to say that not much attention has been paid to how a tomato might view the city – until now.
Beginning 19 October, a fantasy-laden interactive exhibit called Tomatoland is popping up downtown, with attractions like the Ketchup Pool, the Refrigerator World, the Noodle Swing, and the Burger Stop. Its aim? Drawing attention to the thriving metropolis’s environmental concerns.
Yes, really. The immersive Soho experience imagines a New York City as seen through the eyes of a character named Dr. Tomato, a Manhattan transplant from the Galápagos Islands who’s dismayed by the city’s propensity for overwrought packaging and single-use plastics. Through seven rooms with more than 20 interactive scenes, the 4000-square-foot dream world looks to drive home the many ways in which humanity is ruining the planet – in hallucinatory, full-color fashion.
Take that Ketchup Pool, for instance. It’s filled with water that pours in from a plastic bottle, highlighting both the need for conservation and society’s over-reliance on non-renewable materials, and the swimming hole – aka the kitchen sink – comes complete with a bottle-cap car, so people can wade in and witness the problem firsthand. And over in Bread Paradise, a Truman Show–inspired room that reckons with the concept of infinity, visitors are nudged to consider a future in which paradise is lost, descending via bread-shaped stairs to arrive at a surreal door that claims to lead to the promised land.
Lead designer Fiona Dong hopes her contribution to the environmental conversation lights a fire under the exhibit’s guests. “I expect people to think about the excessive consumption and environmental problems in the city and...to take action now," she says.
Admission is $22 (€20) for adults, $18 (€16) for students, and $16 (€14) for kids ages 2 to 12. To buy tickets, or for more information, visit thetomatoland.com.