Reading Palm

In this artist talk, Elia Nurvista will expand on food politics, pointing at how food has political, social, and aesthetic implications—its tastes, recipes, and paths of origin not only weave through cultural traditions but also trace the outlines of global inequalities and their geopolitical histories. In 2015 she initiated the interdisciplinary food study group Bakudapan. She is also part of Struggles for Sovereignty, a transnational solidarity platform engaged in struggles for the self-determination of Indigenous people and their access to basic resources: land, water, farming, and food.

Nurvista will also introduce her ongoing series Long Hanging Fruits (2022–present), which explores the cultivation of palm oil in Indonesia. Today the country is the world’s largest producer of the ubiquitous vegetable oil, which is made from the fruit of the oil palm, a plant introduced from its native Africa by the Dutch. The mass global consumption of palm oil has not only wrought devastation on Indonesian ecosystems due to the excessive deforestation caused by clearing land for palm oil plantations; it has also created a nationwide dependency on the harmful legacy of colonial plantation economies, which have resulted in land disputes between local communities.

Language: English, with simultaneous translation to Arabic

Image caption:

Elia Nurvista (2022), open studio at Jan van Eyck, Maastricht. Courtesy of Jan van Eyck Academie.