Charlottenburger Chaussee 109
13597 Berlin
030 3325772
marian@ich.ms
Workshop and communal meal
Cooking Palm is a cooking workshop led by artist Elia Nurvista using unrefined palm oil. Indonesian gastronomy is unfamiliar with unrefined or red palm oil, it doesn’t appear in any Indonesian recipes, despite it being the biggest palm oil producer in the world. Meanwhile this ingredient is a key ingredient in African cuisine and culture, where palm oil originated, which was then shipped to the East Indies (Indonesia) plantation as industrial crops. In this workshop the artist will work with Indonesian food knowledge and recipes to ‘appropriate the ingredient’ and create a new dish.
Image gallery
nGbK / neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst LOGO
Consumption takes on literal and allegorical dimensions in Elia Nurvista’s work—cooking, eating, and digesting together transform the food, from a symbol of exploitative and industrialized economic cycles, originating from the colonial structures of the nineteenth century into a vital ingredient of hospitality, critical exchange, and rethinking patterns of production and consumption.
Cooking Palm is derived from Elia Nurvista’s ongoing artistic research into Palm Oil. Her work in the exhibition ‘The Route’ is a batik printed textile installation, it retells the complex history of migration and displacement between palm oil and Dutch wax (batik).
Palm was an endemic plant in West Africa, then the Europeans claimed ‘discovery’ of palm oil in the 15th century when it was brought to Europe through slavery. In short, palm oil became a promising and profitable material that can produce many products.
Unexpectedly in West Africa cocoa took priority over palm oil production, forcing industrial palm oil and its investors to turn half-way around the world to Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula to create the first major palm oil plantations (at that time under Dutch colonial rule).
Later, it was Dutch textile companies who developed mass production and commercial applications for Javanese batik (Indonesia) in the middle of the 19th century. It was rejected by the local market due to its mass production and profit-mindedness; the Dutch then found their largest markets at the Atlantic shores of Africa. Both palm oil and Dutch wax share the complex appropriation knowledge of commodities from imperialism and globalization.
Elia Nurvista explores a wide range of art mediums with an interdisciplinary approach and often intersects with politics of food. Through food, she intends to scrutinize power, social, and economic inequality in this world. Using several mediums from workshop, study group, publication, site specific, performance, video and art installations, she explores the social implications of the food system to critically address the wider issues such as ecology, gender, class and geopolitics.
Additional information
Dates
July 2024
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