Consume is an improvised mobile bar with no fixed times or locations which may usually be found by word of mouth. It operates primarily in the public space, sometimes tied into an art event, at other times appropriating a part of the city for its own purposes.

In 1991 the Consume bar was started by Jim Dudley, Tony Hunt + Christian Pantzer in Frankfurt, who were studying architecture at the Frankfurt Staedelschule, primarily to provide a locus for interaction between the disciplines of art and architecture.

The hardware of the bar, standing as a metaphor architecture, consists of a Bricolge of old junk. There is an old surfboard placed, with its fins the wrong way up on two stacks of beer crates. There is a clapped-out ghetto blaster knocking out cassettes of out of date music poached from the radio. 

As the bar is mobile, at times even self-propelled, the locations and the customers, along with with their lubrications of alcohol and music, become the software to create high architecture. The classical hierarchy of architecture in relation to its users and location, or Genius Locii, is turned around so that the ultimate shaper is no longer the architect but the throng of customers themselves. This has been known to be rather unsettling, but we persist...

This site is intended to provide information on upcoming Consumes and a partial archive of some of the material which has survived. You can search this site to find images of characters who have both helped and consumed.