我们都有吃饭的权利

Consulting services for artists, cultural managers, and curators

Presentation on 我们都有吃饭的权利 (all of us who exist have the right to eat) in a discussion of the exhibition Wie ist das mit dem guten Leben?: Pallay Pampa: Andean crossroads , 02.12.21; SOHO Studios, Sandleiten, Vienna

Emilio Santisteban

The work I am presenting in Pallay Pampa. Andean Crossroads is an installation in which more than three hundred potatoes constitute biological presences (non-human bodies) that perform the human language that attempts to define and understand them.

Language—that is, the logos of the human species, its way of understanding the world—is present through a narrative [ which can be read here ].

This narrative comes from Santos Vilca Cayo, an Indigenous farmer from the Andean highlands, and refers to food and how he and his community understand human life as a whole, integrated with all that exists, including illness. It is a worldview in which everything lives, in which even death is life. Undoubtedly, it stems from the principles of "Buen Vivir" (Good Living) that guide the lives of Indigenous peoples: integral unity and harmony of the world, harmony, reciprocity and redistribution among human beings and between them and nature, solidarity and mutual service among all beings.

Thus, the narrative is inscribed, word by word, on each of the potatoes that make up the set.

And yet, when I say that language is performed by the action of those potatoes, I mean that, even in a narrative whose discourse proposes complete harmony in life, those potatoes, which are clearly life itself, instill a disconcerting meaning in human language: human thought, however understanding it tries to be of life, ends up wounding it, and life responds in such a way that equilibrium is restored when the human harm dies. In these potatoes, language cannot help but be a wound destined to become a scar, just as life cannot help but kill, and death cannot help but give life.

Paradoxically, death lives on: while these potatoes kill language, making it less and less legible and turning the wound it has caused into a scar, they themselves cease to be food and become something that, upon dying, wants to germinate new life.

Amid this tension between language and nature and between life and death, there is also tension between agriculture and agribusiness, since these are not native potatoes from the Andes, but Adretta potatoes, that is, potatoes developed industrially in the GDR during the Cold War and produced in millions of tons per year in present-day Russia.

The disconnect between geosystems and geopolitics is also evident: the text above these potatoes on the wall tells us, even if we can't understand it, that "everyone has the right to eat." It's written in the language spoken by China, the potato-producing giant against which the other world powers are fighting to maintain their control over life and death.

Having the right to eat, from the perspective of Indigenous peoples, does not mean feeling destined to wield predatory power over other lives understood as things from which to derive well-being. Having the right to eat, from a vision understood through Indigenous "Buen Vivir" (Good Living), would imply caring for and nourishing those lives that give us life, and in reciprocity, humbly offering our death to all life. But let's not be romantic, let's not be easily deluded. The hopeful gaze we might cast toward the Indigenous world to obtain from it the keys to restoring life's balance is opposed not only by the sum of billions of individual selfishnesses, but by something significantly greater and more monstrous: the imposition of global discord between social and national identities, between cultural models of thought, feeling, and behavior, between humanity and the world's diversity in the endless homogenizing battles of transnational capitalism.