Daniela Ortiz: A Drop of Milk / Ein Tropfen Milch

Kunsthalle Bern is proud to announce the solo exhibition of Peruvian artist Daniela Oritz. 

For her exhibition at Kunsthalle Bern, Ortiz is addressing director iLiana Fokianaki’s overall enquiry into the Plantacionocene as a locus from which we can further understand the intersections of social and environmental justice. With A Drop of Milk, Ortiz presents a new body of work that discusses the violence inflicted on the global majority's territories, people, fauna, and flora, through the rationing, control or over-production of certain foods, by the agricultural industries.

What is the value of a drop of milk? What does hunger mean? A Drop of Milk examines how access to nourishment is shaped by imperial legacies, corporate monopolies, and economic warfare. It situates hunger within a planetary system in which food is no longer primarily cultivated and shared, but instead monitored, withheld, rationed, commodified, artificially enhanced but also used as a means of control, and at times, as a form of punishment.

A Drop of Milk proposes a critical cartography of the politics of hunger under the current neo-liberal and neo-colonial order. The exhibition focuses on economic sanctions, trade blockades, food monopolies and deliberate strategies of deprivation imposed by powers of the so-called Global North, foregrounding, in particular, the role of Switzerland and its corporations in undermining access to food in the global majority. Hunger here is not addressed as the result of accidental or “natural” scarcity, but as a calculated device of domination, exercised either through sanctions or monopolized control.

Deployed against indigenous and collectivist knowledge systems, it is utilised to crush possibilities of care, food sovereignty, dignity and resistance, and to uproot what grows outside the logic of profit, while enforcing a certain image and understanding of alimentation and nurturing.

At the same time, A Drop of Milk highlights popular and political collective practices of resistance, such as the communal units of production of food in Venezuela that emerged as a response to scarcity caused by sanctions, or the struggles in Latin America, where campesino and Indigenous communities resist extractivist and agro-industrial monopolies. Within this framework, food is not understood as a commodity, but reclaimed as a territory of politics and anti-colonial struggle.

The show features twenty-one newly commissioned Bauernmalerei paintings depicting documented cases in which the Swiss government or Swiss corporations enforced sanctions and blockades, or established monopolies (particularly targeting milk production) in territories such as Venezuela and Palestine. A new installation of a puppet show reimagines the fable of Jack and the Beanstalk, a well-known children's tale. In Ortiz's version, the tale is a critique of the role of Swiss corporations in imposing transgenics, monopolies and agrotoxins across the so-called Global South. The beanstalk explodes in size and height and becomes a transgenic monstrous plant. 

The show concludes with an experimental documentary, filmed in both Switzerland and Venezuela, that explores how grassroots initiatives confront scarcity and sanctions, building autonomous infrastructures of survival and care, portraying milk not only as nourishment but as a symbol of sovereignty, which is produced, shared, and defended against the violence of today’s reality in the Plantacionocene, dominated by agribusiness and overall neo-liberal economies. 

Curated by iLiana Fokianaki
Assistant curator Claudia Heim 

Daniela Ortiz (b. 1985) was born in Peru and lives in Cuzco. Ortiz works with painting, film, collage, ceramics, and found objects, often creating large-scale installations. Through her work, she aims to generate visual narratives and pedagogical tools in which the concepts of nationality, racialization, social class, and gender are explored for critically understanding structures of colonial, patriarchal, and capitalist power. Solo exhibitions include Kunsthaus Zurich, Fondazione Sandretto de Rebaudengo, Kölnischer Kunstverein, Vannabe Museum Eindhoven a.o. She has participated in group presentations at the 60th Venice Biennial, MUDAM Museum Luxembourg, MACBA Barcelona, Ludwig Museum Köln, Palais de Tokyo Paris, Kunsthalle Wien, Kunstverein Hamburg, Museo Reina Sofia a.o. 

The exhibition is kindly supported by the Gesellschaft zu Ober-Gewern.

Kunsthalle Bern is supported by the City of Bern.