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P R C C
Creatives

24.1.2020

Profile

Mariana Martínez Balvanera

Initiator

Mariana M Balvanera is a spatial and social designer based in Amsterdam and Mexico City. She develops projects that stand in the intersection between spatial design, social design and interventions using site-specific arts, always in collaboration with cross-disciplinary groups. Embedded in different contexts, these interventions create potential catalysers for exchange, understanding and new collective sense of place.

Since 2015 she collaborates with Cascoland with whom she co-founded the Keepers Lab & Kitchen project, which would later become and Colaboratory Kitchen. She is currently the site coordinator in Chiapas and the coordinator of creative activities and creative links within the project.

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.