The Kitchen School with Food Justice and Mango + Okra | Activity
We’ll return to the ecotopian point of view of our first afternoon snack, with contributions by Lucía Egaña about the idea that “museums can be gardens” and by Daniel Garrido about cultural rights for Barcelona, to ground the conversation in a specific context: public calls for tenders to run museum restaurants, the agroecological transition and diaspora cuisines.
The agro-ecological transition is only really fair if it is also culturally appropriate. We will rethink what this means, and how to avoid new exclusions on the road to change. How can we incorporate this point of view to also make change a welcoming place that respects diverse knowledge and culinary practices?
Dina Bashira resident of the Raval neighborhood and coordinator of Food Justice in Catalonia, will introduce us to processes of agroecological change driven by public procurement according to social and cultural criteria, such as prioritizing local, seasonal produce, supporting small farmers and cutting emissions.
Mango + Okra will connect their artistic and philosophical practice with the following questions: Who decides what is culturally appropriate? From what institutional point of view? When does a menu become “healthy” or “sustainable”? Which cuisines take center stage and which are quietly erased? Can the language of proximity exclude diaspora communities whose ingredients have crossed oceans? Can the green transition become a kind of new moral dogma?
Afterwards, we’ll cook and share a collective chat at the table with Mango + Okra. We’ll approach this as a living argument, not a symbolic gesture. Through aromas, spices, vegetables, herbs and fruit from the shops and restaurants of the Raval, we will think about food as cultural identity, memory and joyful resistance.
The MACBA Kitchen is a learning space led by artist Marina Monsonís.
participant
Marina Monsonís is a visual artist who works with hybrid and heterogeneous processes of social transformation rooted in territories, in collective, community and pedagogical projects that relate marine sciences, place-based design, gastronomy, graffiti, radical geography, ethnography and critical, oral and gestural memory. She works on projects that connect the kitchen with political, critical, social and transgenerational aspects to create debates and transmit knowledge about the complexities and conflicts that inhabit km 0. She is interested in the coexistence of radical spaces where people become constellated in research, techniques, local and global knowledge, old and emerging, maintaining a generous and enriching ecosystem, where joy, exchange and harmony dominate the table. She has directed The Kitchen at MACBA since it began in November 2018.
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