April 25-28 ~ If you happen to visit Brussels these days, Alejandro Cerón (DAI, 2018) would like to invite you to Poppositions, where he will be showing and making Colonial Cocktails:
Colonialism started with the first ships moving objects and subjects across the oceans. Modernity and progress have always been good excuses for plundering. Global trade infrastructures feed colonial dynamics of expansion through exploitation.
Instead of something from the past, colonialism might be thought of as a contemporary phenomena.
Colonial Cocktails refers to the idea of capitalist logic expanding, extracting desire and colonising even the most intimate aspects of human existence. Could we argue that within globalised countries a sort of (endo)colonisalism happens now from within, inside each of us? Is this very realisation a sign of privilege?
This performative installation mimics a potentially dysfunctional market structure: a cocktail bar serving beverages such as the Mojito Diplomático or the Dutch Courage gin-tonic (appellations given by the name of the alcoholic beverages the cocktails are made with). The cost of a drink relies on the self-evaluation of the customer’s own privilege. The privileged pay 5, the not privileged pay 0. This dynamic adds contradiction, and a fictitious quality of fairness.