Dupla Molcajete is an emerging collaboration with my friend and creative partner Zoë-Heyn Jones. Is a space for experimentation in the nexus between food, culture and art. We are focused in research and production of art projects related to edible insects and indigenous food.
I’ve been researching about the Mexican ancestral system of agriculture, the Milpa, and its wild greens “quelites” for a while. I am fascinated by seeds, cuisine instruments, spiritual practices around agriculture, social practices related to food, and the gastronomic legacy that pre date colonial history in Mexico and the North America region.
I am deeply concerned by the effect that both, the international trade agreements and the industrial food compound systems have upon nature, human health, land and food sovereignty.
Visualizing Foodways Field School (Forthcoming)
On February 18, 2023, researchers from all over the continent will meet at Calpulli Tecalco in Milpa Alta to share and exchange knowledge on feminist agroecology, food sovereignty and justice. There will be people from Hemispheric Encounters, Creative Food Research Collaboratory, Food Art Research Network. Colectivo Amasijo and Mujeres de la Tierra will hold activities to share the traditional knowledge of this land with the guest researcheers. That day, by invitation of my friend and collaborator Zoë Heyn-Jones, I will be sharing my research on quelites, the Mexican Wild Greens.
Canadian Council for Arts. 2022
The Canadian Council for Arts supported Dupla Molcajete’s ongoing artistic research into the ancestral and future significance of edible insects in Mexico through experimental filmmaking, publication design, and site-specific installation.
Utopian Studies Society. 2022 Conference
Dupla Molcajete presented the talk “Prefigurative Food Sovereignty: Indigenous Knowledge and Technologies of Care” during the Food-Sovereignty, Sustenance, Hope panel session. Brighton University, U.K. 2022
Ancestral and Future Foods: in Conversation with Dupla Molcajete
FRAGMENT
If we analyze the circumstances under which the world population of the future will be concentrated in large cities and the food of the future is compromised for many, we will discover a multifactorial network, with climate change as a general connector. As we were talking about with Yasmine Ostendorf, founder of the Green Art Lab Alliance, climate change is based upon many other injustices such as racism, gender-based violence, extractivism, colonialism, speciesism, capitalism. This permeates the legitimation systems of mainstream culture, including gastronomy.
It would be helpful to stop romanticizing the idea of having particular foods, and only those, for congeniality and gathering. The junk food that we elevate to the pedestal of “comfort food” is making us and our environment ill. We don’t have to abandon our culinary traditions, but to expand them and let them connect us to people with different worldviews. We all need sustainable food. As in any revolution, we need to believe that every single action matters.
Food and Spirituality
Rebeldía y el buen comer: La revolución que empieza en el ADN
QUELITES: the Spectrum of Superfoods from Indigenous Mexico
Beatriz Paz Jiménez 