Perceiving Food Territories, curated by Colectivo Amasijo
January 25–31, 2027
Food and art research residency / Location: Oaxaca, Mexico / Dates: January 25–31, 2027 / Curated by Colectivo Amasijo, organised by The Gramounce.
This course proposes colour as an epistemological category: not a visual attribute of objects, but a form of ecological knowledge produced through sustained relationships between communities, species, and territories. In the Central Valleys of Oaxaca, the region with the greatest linguistic and biological diversity in Mexico, colour has historically operated across domains that Western disciplinary structures tend to separate: agriculture, medicine, textile production, cuisine, ritual, and trade. A pigment such as cochineal is simultaneously an agricultural product, a dyeing technology, a medium of colonial commerce, and a material that reshaped European painting. To study colour in Oaxaca is therefore to study the entanglement of biodiversity, technique, and cultural memory.
The course is situated within current debates on biocultural heritage, material culture, and situated knowledge. It departs from the premise that pigments and dyes constitute archives: they register ecosystems, seasonal cycles, extraction economies, and intergenerational transmission of technique. Reading colour in this way reframes familiar sites. The market stall becomes a cartography of bioregions; the textile, a document; the plate of food, a landscape condensed through processes of drying, smoking, roasting, charring, and grinding.
A second premise concerns the continuity between dyeing and cooking. Both are technologies of transformation governed by fire, water, time, and mineral agents; both encode material knowledge developed and refined by communities, frequently by women, over centuries. Nixtamalization, mordanting, fermentation, and the preparation of mole are approached here as parallel operations within a single technological field. The course thus positions food and colour not as adjacent themes but as expressions of the same territorial intelligence.
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