Nourishing Conversations

︎︎︎ artistic research with Steffie de Gaetano and Francesca Gattello (Marginal Studio)





Modernity has subjected the rural world to the extensive exploitation of human and non-human resources through practices of oppression and violence. This colonial approach has led to episodes of internal colonization through actions of invasive or destructive terraforming.

In Italy, during the fascist regime, a bonifica integrale was executed starting from the “Serpieri laws” in 1924: the introduction of more efficient and integrated "roads, mountain passes, waterways, and irrigation systems" included, the development of “rural centers for the purpose of settling farmers on the land” giving birth to what is now a “difficult heritage”.

In this framework, the imperial enterprise designed Borgo Rizza as a controlling unit for the vaste Sicilian latifundia, which – in opposition to the urban sphere – was considered an empty land to occupy. This emblematic site of oppression, which problematizes the colonial relationship between the countryside/environment, the food production policies, and the imposition of an abstract model of inhabiting a place, is the starting point and a case study for our project. Borgo Rizza is the place which triggered the need of experimenting with alternative practices of reappropriation and resignification of a space loaded with a difficult heritage and tied to a history of oppression. Borgo Rizza has been our testing ground that through Nourishing

Conversations has been nurtured and inhabited with collective practices of care, conviviality and sharing knowledge.

Colonial power, agricultural production, and agrobiodiversity are inextricably linked.

From production, through processing, packaging, distribution, consumption and waste, the modern/colonial food system has established unhealthy, socially unjust, environmentally destructive food supply chains. Invisibilized within structures of liberal governmentality and the discourse of the State, the Western exploitative, oppressive, and dominative food system controls immense global resources bound up with the development of capitalism and rooted in colonialism. This system has legalized and normalized conditions of alienation, land dispossession and multi-species abuses by disconnecting bodies from the land, and foodways, provoking hunger and malnutrition on one hand, diseases and overconsumption on the other. The industrialization process in fact provoked the uniformation of food and gave impulse to the formation of national food tradition through cultural constructions.

Gathering around the mobile kitchen designed and realized by Marginal Studio for the Difficult Heritage Summer School 2022, we hosted a series of cooking workshops, walks, and discussions on collective food preparation, opening up critical reflections about the background stories on capitalist food system and policies, agroecology, social justice, and the built environment.

Starting from Borgo Rizza, we looked beyond its planned perimeter through the surrounding landscape, the local network of farmers, their cultivation practices and relations to the land, the colonial histories behind products, the colonial structures upheld by farming through forms of contemporary slavery, the constructed Italian identities around food, local and oral recipes passed on through generations, and alien/invasive plant species.