Español, este es el oro que comes?, 2018

In a seventeenth-century drawing made by the Peruvian chronicler Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala, one of the founders of the Inca civilisation, Capac Inca, asks a Spanish coloniser: Cay coritacho micunqui? (Do you eat this gold?). And the invader replies: ‘We eat this gold.’ Daniela Ortiz took this as a starting point for a performative action set up as a banquet. With a group of Spanish diners seated at a long table, the artist ‘served’ a series of appropriately illustrated dishes while an anti-colonial reading of Spanish gastronomy was made. Regarding the action and the series of dishes, Ortiz writes: ‘This is the same gold that was eaten by the customers of the chocolate boutique in which I worked in 2010, where 24-carat gold was served as decoration on the cakes made of Guanaja chocolate, another product extracted from the invaded territories whose specific denomination, Guanaja, refers to the island in which Christopher Columbus obtained the first cocoa beans in the year 1502.’ Without forgetting historical racism, Ortiz focuses on the current colonial order, reproduced in the forms of food production, distribution and consumption.