Salted Waters In the Whorls of Time

Apr 19, 2021

This lecture explores ideas around radical care and multispecies resistance to colonial biopolitics, through the practices of cooking and storytelling. We’ll engage with stews—dishes typically meant to nourish families and communities, passed down through generations, and situated in the complex intersection of personal and cultural histories—as materializations of the concept of errantry, present in the work of Martinican philosopher Édouard Glissant. In a stew, a number of local ingredients are brought together through contact with salted liquids—a conceptual link to the sacredness of sea and saltwater. Roots, spices, smells and flavors are deeply embedded in histories of anticolonial resistance and community building; they are multispecies articulations that complicate linear notions of time and space, that demand attention and care, and challenge notions of home and belonging, origin and nativeness.

Luiza Prado de O. Martins (she/her) is an artist and researcher whose work examines themes around fertility, reproduction, coloniality, gender, and race. In her doctoral dissertation, she approaches the control over fertility and reproduction as a foundational biopolitical gesture for the establishment of the colonial/modern gender system, theorizing the emergence of “techno-ecologies of birth control” as a framework for observing—and resisting, disrupting, troubling—colonial domination. Her ongoing artistic research project, titled A Topography of Excesses, looks into encounters between human and plant beings within the context of indigenous and folk reproductive medicine, approaching these practices as expressions of radical care. Throughout 2020, she will develop the long-term garden project “In Weaving Shared Soil” in collaboration with The Institute for Endotic Research. She is currently based in Berlin. She is a founding member of Decolonising Design