Aldo Esparza Ramos: “A bird told me that we are made of stories.” E. Galeano
Aldo E.Ramos' 20 minute presentation for CONSTANT CRAVING ~ PERFORMING UNDER CONDITIONS - DAI's 3 day graduation lectures marathon, June 2018 was entitled “A bird told me that we are made of stories.” E. Galeano
Summary
Aldo, wearing a handmade embroidered bag over the shoulder, begins by stating that he was very nervous for his presentation, since he doesn’t have a final work yet. Instead, he will present what he has: cacao. A slide projected on the screen behind him reads “How to change the meaning to consumption of a natural resource?”. With the slideshow continuing, showing an excerpt from Wikipedia, Aldo elaborates that Theobroma – another name for the cacao tree – is derived from the Greek, translating to “food of the gods”. He talks about the trees tricky growing conditions and mentions that it contains theobromine, a slightly addictive stimulant. Passing around some chocolate for the audience to sample, he hands the word to Luca Carboni, who reads a story about Quetzalcoatl, the “son of creation” who was given a chocolate drink from the gods, passed it on to people who abused it and as a result, was expelled from the region by the gods.
Aldo continues his lecture presentation, which is structured in four recipes containing chocolate, and accompanied by slides displaying a variety of still and moving images: “Casanova’s drink”, “Chocolate Easter eggs”, “Hershey’s D-bar” and “Cacao that comes from the soil”. Through the recipes Aldo tells us about the history, meanings and entanglements of cacao and chocolate in various contexts: from playing a part in Casanova’s seduction scheme in 18th century Italy, when cacao was extremely expensive – 200g of cacao could be traded for one slave – to the British Quaker J.S. Fry who turned chocolate into a candy, and is most known for mass producing chocolate easter eggs, in the Christian tradition a symbol of life and the afterlife, now produced with cacao from the colonies. We hear about the Hershey Company in Pennsylvania, founded by a “utopian entrepreneur” who taught orphans and had them work in his factories and was involved in a deal the U.S. government made with Cuba, giving him land to produce cocoa and sugar for his production. In return, he made chocolate bars for the U.S. Army field rations, where chocolate became a delicious energy provider for the soldiers. While we see an excerpt from “The Dark Side of Chocolate”, a 2010 documentary by Miki Mistrati, Elien Ronse reads another story, set 1948 in the divided city Berlin at Tempelhof Airport. An American pilot chatting with hungry children behind a fence, decided to give them two strips of gum, which instead of fighting over, they broke into smaller pieces to share. Moved by witnessing this, he then collected chocolate and gum from other soldiers and during his next flight over the area dropped it all for the children to collect. Chocolate here becomes a symbol for freedom and democracy.
Aldo continues his presentation, moving on to recipe number 4: we learn he “isn’t looking for chocolate falling from the sky, but for cocoa that comes from the soil”, and that the cacao he speaks of comes from a reality that can’t be found on Google maps. He points to a slide with a map of Central America to indicate where the unmapped place he speaks of is located, a town in Mexico called La Realidad. Aldo shares that for him chocolate is “a bridge to connect worlds”, that he is looking for dialogue with other worlds through ‘sentipensar’ or thinking through feeling, for a celebration of difference that must be preserved. Indigenous cultures are “living seeds of diversity” to him; on the screen we now see a timelapse video of mushrooms growing on a windowsill. In closing, he states that he aims to share testimonies and experiences to reflect the neglection, exploitation and genocide that indigenous communities are confronted with. As consumers, he points out, we can make choices about the products we buy. Finally, he laments the lost cultures and uses of cacao, “erased by the options of the process of production”.
Responses
Hypatia Vourloumis
Hypatia Vourloumis opens her response with the confession that coffee is her god as well, connecting to Aldo’s description of cacao as a sacred and addictive resource. She recounts his example of Casanova, which reveals the relationship between “revolution”, intellectualism, and wealth. Through his presentation, Aldo laid out the historical forces linked to the production of cocoa, such as the Atlantic slave trade, colonial extraction, militarism, imperialism, Christianity, freedom, and democracy.
Hypatia Vourloumis returns to the question projected at the beginning of Aldo’s presentation and wonders how the different pieces of it fit together, how his choices to displays them – through Google maps, short videos and excerpts of film, Wikipedia entries – brings up the question of representation in relation to the critique he makes. She lists the unmapped location in Chiapas, the used Zapatista slogan “one world where many worlds can exist”, and ‘thinking through feeling’ as examples of things he touched upon which she would have liked to hear more about, especially the latter in relation to his establishing of a problematic, critique and anticolonial stance. She feels this is a project in process, still “in need of some cooking”, and her main question is about methodology – she wants to know what the cocoa makes possible for Aldo, opposed to just the problematic and the critique.
Maria Lind
Maria Lind references a rise of of popular books from the past 15 years, on the social, political and economic history of particular materials or matter such as salt or coffee. While these ‘airport bookstore bestsellers’ may be frowned upon, they can be interesting and important in their function of directing people’s attention to previously unacknowledged things, she sais. The delivery of his presentation felt a bit in the vain of such books, emulating the air of a “popular educator”. She points to the generosity of his presentation and its interesting structure in the form of recipes, linking back to his question of consumption. She potentially also sees “the seed of an agitator” in Aldo, and she perceives in Aldo the skill to share the urgent and relevant issues addressed.
Bassam El Baroni
Bassam El Baroni recalls first meeting Aldo, when the project was still in its formative stage, and the series of Kitchen presentations he did leading up to this presentation, which shows the hard work he put into it over the last two years and displays the growth of his skillset, relationship to the research, and confidence. While happy with the progression, he feels there is still work to be done, picking up Hypatia Vourloumis’s question about representation in relationship to the decolonialization, which will be important to think about when moving forward. He finds it interesting what Aldo achieved in a narrative sense, since the beginning of the process.