Thickening the chocolate The Open Kitchen. Questions of language and enunciation around the colonial past and its legacies.
The MACBA’s Kitchen is a meeting space, but also a social laboratory where participants can inhabit dissent. The previous Open Kitchen session included the participation of Ana Felicien, Andrés Antebi, Yazel Parra and Patrizia del Razo, who helped us trace a history of cocoa crisscrossed by its colonial legacies, so rooted in our customs.
That session brought the bitter flip side of a traditional cup of chocolate to the table. Andrés Antebi’s presentation on Spanish—and Catalan—colonial plunder in Equatorial Guinea led to a debate that could not be fully explored due to lack of time. At the MACBA Kitchen we believe in the importance of simmering debates over a low flame and holding difficult conversations with the care they deserve. That is why we are convening a second monographic session on cocoa, where we will try to thicken the chocolate.
Yaneth Valencia, a true political reference for Afro-descendant women living with HIV in Colombia, will open the session with a presentation on the role of the chocolatada in the community rituals of Lila Mujer, the association that she founded to fight stigma and resignify the lives of women made vulnerable by racism, poverty and armed conflict.
Andrés Antebi, from the Observatori de la Vida Quotidiana, will talk with Elvira Dyangani Ose, director of the MACBA, about the complexities and contradictions faced by anthropology in the difficult task of addressing its colonial past. In this conversation, open to the public, burning questions of a terminological and methodological nature will be addressed, over a low flame. From the place occupied by colonized subjects in the production of epistemological knowledge to the heated controversy surrounding the circulation of images that document colonial violence.
If you have any question, feel free to contact us on 93 481 33 68 or by email at macba [at] macba [dot] cat
