Pilot Interventions in Ejidos of Chiapas

The Dutch collective Cascoland joins Mexican creatives, UNAM and University of Wageningen researchers, in generating communication bridges between academics and ejidatarios of the Marqués de Comillas municipality, Chiapas, in search of a social and environmental development for the area.

Visiting the jungles of Chiapas, Cascoland didn’t bring much more than a kitchen table. Together with local cooks the team prepared food, exploring a new culinary culture using locally sourced products, materials and techniques. In doing so, exchanging ideas on a more balanced lifestyle that reconciles food production with the conservation of the tropical rainforest and can help improve the quality of life at the border of the Lacandon Jungle.

The Marqués de Comillas municipality, located on the southeast border of the Montes Azules reserve, has undergone a drastic landscape change in the last 40 years; from the establishment of ejidos formed by communities from different states of the Mexican republic, which depend on agriculture and livestock for economic sustenance. For this reason, the region is of great importance to understand how to reconcile the conservation of the forest with the integral development of the communities that inhabit it.

The Cascoland project – Keepers Lab&Kitchen – aims to generate spaces for meeting, dialogue and knowledge sharing using food as a central element, staged by arts and design. As a starting point for a long-term collaboration, the group has formulated a first intervention: creating meetings between different groups working and living in the area around a mobile culinary lab using the kitchen table like the catalyst for exchange.

In January and February 2018, the 15 members of the Cascoland collective, half Dutch and half Mexican, made up of artists, chefs, architects, sociologists, designers and video-audio makers; carried out a pilot of the Lab&Kitchen, in which they visited 5 ejidos of the region. An ejido is a commonly owned self-organised farmed land. Marqués de Comillas is composed of different Ejidos, each of them managed differently, focused on different agricultural produce and with different culinary cultures.

Around the kitchen tables, sharing and cooking, stories were exchanged about local consumption, the origin of edible products, agriculture, jungle resources and culinary traditions in the area. The actions taken to the different ejidos are part of a collective work methodology, in which participation is encouraged through activations of public spaces that allow creative exchange. The kitchen table was used as a metaphor for the exchange of this knowledge, activating the collaboration between the different actors.

Different tools for communication were tested in these interventions, such as mobile radios, home kitchens, dialogue tables and a mobile print press for recipe books. These tools will be further designed in the long run for establishing a permanent Lab&Kitchen. In the future, these interdisciplinary communities will work together to build a location in Marqués de Comillas, where residents can be part of a program that allowing the design of new proposals for the regeneration and conservation of forests and a cultural and economic development of the area.

This project was funded by Stimuleringsfonds for Creative Industries, “Climate Action Challenge” by What Design Can Do 2017, and UNAM through the project Reserbos, INREF-FOREFRONT-WUR.

Collaborators

Local

Rafa Lombera
Communities from Loma Bonita, Chajúl, El Pirú, Flor de Marqués y Adolfo López Mateos

Creatives

Fiona de Bell
Roel Schoenmakers
Femke Bijlsma
Mariana Martínez Balvanera
Jesper Buursink
Bart Majoor
Szolt Kamaras
Elizabeth Guerrero
Abraham Soriano
Sara Perez
Bruno Ruiz
Michelle Ponce

Chefs

Pau Ballesteros
Daniel Nates
Alam Méndez
FoodHunter MX (Viridiana Valerio)

Academics

Miguel Martínez
Patricia Balvanera
Franz Bonghers
Thom Kuipers
Carolina Berget
Antonio Castro
Aline Pingarroni
Diego Hernández