Food, Art & Activism: Nourishing Ourselves and Each Other with Minia Biabiany, CATPC – Cercle d’art des travailleurs de plantation congolaise, Ramata Coulibaly, Binta Diaw, Luiza Prado de O. Martins, Tracey Rose & guests: Luvinsky Atche, Darlène Kassem, Nkhensani Mkhari, Ozoz Sokoh & Magda Tedla (i.a.)

M.Bassy e.V. is conceiving the interdisciplinary exhibition project Food, Art & Activism: Nourishing Ourselves and Each Other from September until November 2024, which invites works & voices of selected artists, activists, authors & collectives from the African continent and the diaspora to Hamburg to engage aesthetically, critical-investigatively, anthropologically and socio-politically with the themes of food, nutrition, ecology, agriculture and collective resource use from a decolonial, global-southern perspective. The project comprises a two-month group exhibition presenting sculptural, installative and video works by Minia Biabiany, CATPC – Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise, Ramata Coulibaly, Binta Diaw, Luiza Prado de O. Martins & Tracey Rose, three artist & research residencies and accompanying events consisting of artist talks, lectures, food performances and a film screening – furthermore including activists, cultural and culinary actors as Luvinsky Atche, Darlène Kassem, Nkhensani Mkhari, Ozoz Sokoh & Magda Tedla – that seek to approach the topics of food, art and activism holistically and in collaboration with the Hamburg audience.

The exhibition project asks how Black & Afrodiasporic lived experiences can be made visible in the consumption and production of the food stream. How can we sharpen our view for the roots of patriarchal capitalism and monopolistic systems of agriculture? And beyond that, what forms of identity formation and connectedness can we identify in the food culture of Black and Afro-diasporic communities? We invite artistic & cultural actors who consider food and art as a means of resistance and collective empowerment and address these themes through visual, performative, discursive, participatory, and collaborative interventions. Reclaiming food and strategies of »feeding oneself« is crucial for marginalized communities to free themselves from historical mechanisms of exploitation.

Locating this discourse in Hamburg is decisive against the backdrop that the port city historically acted as a gateway to the colonial world and the profit of local shipping companies and merchant families was closely intertwined with colonial resource theft and the enslavement of people to cheap labor. Colonial products such as sugar, coffee and bananas are still consumed today, without the historical and trans-Atlantic entanglements often being considered.

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