foodculture days — Devouring the Soil’s Words
At the Intersection of Food, Cultural Revitalisation, and Storytelling.
Interview with Margaux Schwab and Ana Núñez Rodríguez
As part of my research, I've been particularly interested in investigating contemporary ecology and innovative methods of collective learning.
During my recent research trip, I had the opportunity to participate in foodculture days in Vevey, Switzerland, during the month of May. This biennale celebrates socially engaged art and practices questioning- our relationship with the world and promotes diversity in all its forms by empowering the earth, our bodies, and especially our mouths as powerful technologies.
I have been following this project since 2020, and it continues to captivate me with its multidisciplinary approach and coming together of human and non-human communities over the course of ten days. It serves as a hopeful reminder of the beauty that arises from coexistence and sharing in this planetary and local encounter.
Approaching food from diverse perspectives, foodculture days explores the importance of eating as a fundamental aspect of life's rituals. In this context, I had the pleasure of coming across "Cooking Potato Stories," by Ana Núñez Rodríguez, a nourishing contribution in the form of a publication that activated public space during the biennale.
In an in-depth interview with Margaux Schwab, founder and director of foodculture days, and Ana Núñez Rodríguez, research based photographer and author, we delved into this year's biennale titled Devouring the Soil's Words. Through our conversation, we explored the founder and curator's perspective and emphasised the importance of intertwining food, cultural revitalisation, and storytelling — all prominent themes beautifully encapsulated in Ana Núñez Rodríguez's work.
Interview with Margaux Schwab, Founder and Director of foodculture days
JKH: Thinking back to the time we spent together at the biennale, your curatorial approach during those ten convivial days in Vevey focused on three fundamental pillars: the territory, the commons, and artistic creation.
Can you share more about these curatorial approaches and how these three themes intertwined during the biennale?
MS: The biennale's intertwined themes were carefully chosen as axes of reflection rather than fixed topics. They intersect and are independent of each other, stemming from our research conducted in 2022. Through encounters with the European community of practice and visits to projects in Mexico, these themes emerged as central to the transdisciplinary nature of food culture today. Artists, cultural practitioners, translators, poets, cooks, biologists, scientists, and ethnologists all contribute to these discussions. The selected themes reflect both the insights from what the field is telling us and our own reflections on what is significant to address.
Our approach has always been to address global issues from a local standpoint. We believe it's crucial to address topics such as biodiversity, memory, history, and resources in order to understand and tackle urgent global dynamics — and we do so by bridging the perspectives of artists discussing this topic from their unique viewpoints with practitioners actively engaged in the field in Switzerland, particularly within the context of Vevey, which is characterised by its specific geology, communities, knowledge systems, politics, and ecologies.
As you observed during your visit, the environment here is unique and distinctive. There are a multitude of elements to absorb when experiencing the landscape and surroundings. As an interdisciplinary biennale and cultural organisation, we consistently evaluate our own methods and approaches. Exploring the theme of artistic creation has provided us with an opportunity to reflect on our actions and assess the influence of Biennale events and cultural initiatives within the Vevey community. Additionally, we aim to understand the power and significance of art and culture in addressing climate change issues and social challenges.
It’s like a meta-reflection on our practices and how they relate to the topics of territory and the commons. When discussing the commons, we explore concepts such as access to land and alternative visions for living, working, and coexisting within the existing system.
We also ask ourselves how we can collaborate and envision alternative methods of working together. Art, culture, and engagement with the territory all play vital roles in this exploration.
JKH: Focusing on the intersection of art and ecology and their shared ability to open boundaries and shift perspectives.
As director and curator of foodculture days, how can you use your own creative or connective practices as a form of activism or as a tool for transformation?
MS: Well, I think the role of a curator is to create connections in order to highlight unspoken or invisible relationships among various elements, be it objects, people, locations, or bodies. That’s the potential that I see at the very core of curatorial practices, which are always contextually situated.
One's perspective as a curator is often reflected in their choices. As for myself, I approach food culture with an open mind and a curiosity for the diverse practices that intersect with food, politics, and ecologies. Engaging with people and actively listening to them in non-traditional settings, such as marketplaces, fields, kitchens, and domestic places, can foster meaningful knowledge exchange. These intimate spaces hold immense potential for connecting with others and understanding their work's significance amidst the various challenges we face today.
As an activist, I personally adopt a hands-on approach by immersing myself in these environments and establishing genuine relationships. This allows me to comprehend the values and intentions behind their efforts while recognising the importance of their work within our ever-evolving world.
I think art and culture serve as powerful tools for transformation and emancipation in our society. They have the ability to bring forth hidden dynamics and shed light on the interconnectedness of different aspects of our lives. By approaching these topics in a poetic and socially engaged manner, they can unravel the intricacies of our society. The notion of ecology, with its emphasis on interrelationship and entanglement, further reinforces this understanding.
In my practice I strive to uncover the interconnectedness that exists between all living beings. Because I really do believe that everything around us is a matter of relationships.
JKH: Cooking Potato Stories by Ana Núñez Rodríguez.
What do you think are the stories we need to share in this moment of great change, and what stories need to be told to usher new futures?
MS: I believe in the power of personal stories. At foodculture days, we invite people to share their own experiences, as there is nothing more potent than a personal story. Nothing can gaslight our experience as a body in this world, feeling, sensing, and being traversed by emotions and thoughts. These stories can range from tales of violence and colonial history to simple organisms being silenced or oppressed. Every story has its own significance and deserves to be heard.
I don't know if I'm really entitled to say which are the ones that need to be shared more than others. I believe every story has the power and the right to be shared and heard.
However, I believe in the importance of shedding light on the colonial pasts of certain regions and the lasting effects they have on communities today. By making these stories visible, we can bring attention to the true consequences and traces of extractivism and capitalism that continue to impact our world. In facing the current crisis, it is crucial that we acknowledge and understand the true costs associated with not respecting planetary boundaries.
Ultimately, every story holds value, deserving equal opportunity for sharing and listening. By providing a platform for these narratives at foodculture days, we aim to create an inclusive space where people can learn from one another's experiences and foster greater empathy for all perspectives.
It is essential to listen and give importance to stories that need to be heard. However, it is equally important to also acknowledge and incorporate narratives of collaboration, reciprocity, mutualism, and symbiosis. We must develop new languages and imaginaries that encompass hope in the art field and public sphere to prevent falling into nihilism or despair. Instead of constantly seeking solutions for everything, we should embrace discomfort and remain engaged in the complexities of our troubled present. Our focus should be on caring for what already exists and providing visibility rather than protection—more so through care for those who are marginalized and less visible, as they often suffer the most.
I think the contribution of Ana’s Cooking Potato Stories is a significant and profound way to explore and shape the future. It serves as both a political statement and an archive that offers insight into our collective direction. The fact that these stories existed in the marketplace at foodculture days provided a very important bridge for accessibility and exchange.
We were very happy to welcome Ana at the biennale. For sure, her Cooking Potato Stories are undoubtedly deserving of being shared and listened to. I hope that they will travel to different territories, including our own bodies, and also through you.
Cooking Potato Stories by Ana Núñez Rodríguez at Vevey Market, Switzerland. Photos: Pionira
Interview with Ana Núñez Rodríguez, author of Cooking Potato Stories
JKH: Based on your own experiences traveling between Latin America and Europe, how can translocal stories and the practice of storytelling encourage cultural revitalisation?
ANR: We all make sense of the world around us through a combination of narratives, but in all cultures, certain things dominate over others. We are all entangled in a continuous struggle of narratives, but there are always certain ideological and power mechanisms behind those narratives around a particular event, object, space, or person that condition the way we think and perceive reality and influence our construction as individuals. The subjectivities behind narratives are embedded in our historical memory and encapsulated in local ideas; and by exploring counter narratives, I seek to confront that.
Stories are an important element in how we integrate new ideas into our imaginaries, and those imaginaries hold fantasies and strong belief systems that configure our own worlds. So I wonder, what happens if we transform these sets of stories? Can new narratives instigate change? Telling stories is the first form of resistance. I realised that by digging the soil— you can really unearth knowledge that has been covered. Tracing the history of the potato and exploring different narratives around it has been a way to find ourselves face-to-face with those political, social, and emotional relationships with historical roots that still persist and influence how we see ourselves and others. This collection of counter-narratives seeks to confront the legacies of colonialism and reconfigure relationships with ourselves, family, society, and the natural world.
I started collecting stories around the potato, inspired by a movement in Latin America that took place towards the end of the 1970s. A current of thought concerned with the collective (re)construction of history emerged on the margins of institutional academia and was widely disseminated during the 1980s. Originally known as “popular history,” or “the collective recovery of history,” and often involving oral history practices, this strand of thought called into question the specialised character of historical knowledge production and the conventional procedures that comprised it, proposing other ways of "making history" from multiple perspectives, including those of women, workers, and young people, to show what different actors made of the events.
Emerging on the margins of the academy and the institutions which it represented, the collective (re)construction of history, in dialogue with the intellectual proposals of the time, questioned the fundamental conventional epistemologies of disciplinary history, and put forward another way to “make history" in a scenario of diffusion of political theories and practices linked to social movements. The popular sectors and the very actors involved in the research processes gave serious thought to the possibility of collectively “recovering” history; that is to say, they called into question the production of historical knowledge and their procedures as an exclusive faculty of historians as knowledge experts. Cooking Potato Stories seeks to follow this alternative approach to knowledge production, giving voice to farmers, family members, artists, friends, migrants, and so from Latin America to Europe towards a (re)constructed history of potatoes.
JKH: To what extent does the potato serve as a symbolic representation of belonging, connection, and culture in your work and research?
ANR: I was born in a very conservative rural area in the north of Spain, where potato growing has huge importance since most people grow their own. They are so proud of their potatoes, in what I like to call root patriotism. But I have been living in Colombia, in Latin America, where the potato comes from. Potato was a conversation starter within my family and context, linking themes like identity but also colonial heritage to the construction of our social imaginaries.
In this project, I use the analogy between the potato and myself as a starting point: both moved between Europe and Latin America, with both trips characterised by acceptance and adaptation. The history of the potato is marked by many obstacles to its acceptance as a food crop: a long process of transformation throughout which many conflicts, beliefs, and traditions stood in the way. The potato was carried to Europe by the conquerors, and we assume that it has always existed in its current form, but it took a couple of centuries before it was accepted as a food crop.
In the Andean society, it played a central role as a food crop (it gives a higher quantity of nutrients in less cultivated land) and also as part of their cosmogony. When it arrived, it was only used as a decorative plant, for the beauty of its flower, and appreciated only for its superficial value. It was not eaten because it did not appear in the Bible, considering it the root of the devil. Because its shape is similar to testicles, they thought it had aphrodisiac qualities and because it was the bread of the Indians, there was the belief that you would become like them if you ate their food. Food has also been a tool for social differentiation, and all these stories contributed to the potato's negative representation. However, with the passing of the centuries, new stories contributed to changing that, and the potato was assimilated to the diet of many countries, now universally cultivated, demonstrating its ability to adapt to new contexts, soils, and cultures.
The potato has been appropriated by different cultures around the world as their own. We often hear “ours are from here”: even while we are unconsciously eating our collective past, the use of sentences like this is a common reaffirmation of how strong the relationship is between food and local and national identity. The potato has integrated and transformed into a signal of the identity of many countries, becoming the root of the patriotism I mentioned before.
Food, in the sense of both produce and cuisine, is a crucial component of people’s sense of collective belonging. Food, then, is related to identity formation. It was precisely the potato’s adaptability to the existing food culture that helped overcome the initial prejudices against its cultivation. The potato thus became a vehicle for experiencing nationhood, reminding people of who they were and are. I like to call it “the perfect migrant,” because it is easily adapted to the cuisine and type of soil of the place it arrives.
The continuous transformation and adaptation of the potato become a metaphor for human resilience and for how our identities are rooted in the stories we tell one another. Here, it also serves to open a conversation about identity, politics, and some of the difficulties that must be overcome when adapting to new contexts and the forms of power that are within. Potato has this ability to easily connect to the collective consciousness and provides a way to talk about ourselves. In my case, it was especially linked to colonialism and identity (connecting historical, cultural, personal, and emotional narratives), but also to others connected to social differentiation, migration, survival, displacement, family, belonging, sharing, resilience, adaptation, and globalisation. The potato is a way to talk about ourselves.
JKH: One of the strands of your work focuses on the perspective that “today a region does not necessarily have to be a space defined politically or geographically, but a specific space for common stories and experiences, a state of mind rather than a place on the map." Can you share more on this topic?
ANR: I think that we are the stories we tell each other, that we are moved by stories, not by ideas. There are three types of stories, she argues: the ones we tell ourselves about the world, the ones we tell ourselves about others, and the ones we tell ourselves about ourselves. They don’t change reality per se, but the perception of reality; by changing perception, we change, and by changing ourselves, reality changes in some way.
Stories are essential in configuring our worlds beyond countries, borders, and barriers. Therefore, finding our place means finding our place in a story. And if we are moved by my stories, let's choose the ones we want to be moved by!
JKH: We’ve spent several days reflecting, digesting, and metabolizing at foodculture days. How was your experience as an artist at the biennale?
ANR: The participation in the biennale was a really enriching and inspiring experience. The selection of works conveyed really nicely the complex idea of how polyhedric our relationship with food is and how it connects with many aspects of ourselves. I mostly work with photography, and it was so inspiring to see how other forms of art respond to research questions regarding our relationship with food.
What was the best aspect for me was the opportunity to share a space with an amazing group of artists, researchers, and volunteers from all over the world, sharing not only food but also practices, reflections, and stories. Actually, from these encounters, new collaborative projects are coming up!!
Margaux Schwab (Director and Founder of foodculture days)
Margaux (1989, La Tour-de-Peilz, Switzerland) lives and works between Berlin, Germany, and Vevey, Switzerland. She is a cultural producer and curator working at the intersection of art, ecology and hospitality, prioritising spaces outside the gallery context. After graduating with a degree in Hospitality Science from the Hotel School in Lausanne, Switzerland, she moved to Berlin in 2015. In 2016, she founded foodculture days, a knowledge-sharing platform around food ecologies and politics. foodculture days serves as a catalyst for discussions and actions through environmental and social claims, employing a biennale format that hosts a multitude of creative and culinary interventions in Vevey.
Joana Krämer Horta (Director and Founder of Ponto d’Orvalho)
Joana (1993, Regenburg, Germany) is a cultural manager and curator who lives and works between Lisbon and Montemor-o-Novo, Portugal.
Her practice and research revolve around emerging art and new programming formats, focusing on new artistic languages and transdisciplinary contemporary production by expanding the discussion about environmental action through artistic, social, and ecological practices.
In 2020, she founded Ponto d’Orvalho, a project in the form of a transdisciplinary festival based in Montemor-O-Novo, Central Alentejo, Portugal, that has been playing an important role in reflecting on the symbiotic relationship between art and ecology.
Foodculture Days 2023. Photos: Beatriz Zebrato