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Marqués de Comillas, Chiapas, México

Pilot Interventions in Ejidos of Chiapas

Cooking and exchanging in the frontier of the Lacandona Rainforest

Pilot 2018, Marqués de Comillas, Chiapas, Mexico. 2018. Photo Bruno Ruiz

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.

Piloto 2018, Marqués de Comillas, Chiapas, Mexico. 2018. Foto Bruno Ruiz
Piloto 2018, Marqués de Comillas, Chiapas, Mexico. 2018. Foto Bruno Ruiz
Piloto 2018, Marqués de Comillas, Chiapas, Mexico. 2018. Foto Bruno Ruiz

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

The kitchen is a social place, a com­mon place to gather and connect. It is a place to share not only food, but stories, ideas, aspirations and initiatives. Colaboratory Kitchen is an ongoing mobile and on-site project that brings farmers, scientists, creatives and cooks together around the kitchen table to connect, exchange knowledge and prototype new trans-disciplinary solutions to farming; a test ground for ideas that conciliate land restoration, conservation, food production and better livelihood in farming communities. A response to the lack of connection between disciplines that are key for new alternatives towards more sustain­able and just futures.

The questions at stake are: How do we bridge scientific and local knowledge? What kind of interdisciplinary projects can we create towards a better livelihood and ecological resilience of farmer communities? How can we conserve the environment and its biodiversity in balance with sustainable food production and pair local consumption to global demand?

We create a space for a trans-disciplinary community to grow and take action, by sharing and cooking futures together.

The project was initiated in 2016 as a collaboration between Cascoland and the Forefront Project (WUR, UNAM), a joint effort to design spaces and tools of communication and action towards strengthening socio-ecological bonds, south of the Lacandona Jungle, Chiapas, México. Now a days the scheme is being developed in three rural locations in Mexico: Santo Domingo Tomaltepex, Oaxaca, Xochimilco, Mexico City and Loma Bonita, Chiapas, as a collaboration with UNAM, local organizations and a range of collaborations from professionals in different disciplines.