Willem de Rooij, Valkenburg, Centraal Museum, Utrecht
These paintings show clouds you cannot find in Suriname.
This exhibition is about what you don’t see.
In Suriname there are hardly any clouds. The clouds in Valkenburg’s paintings are very Dutch. He paints Suriname as if it were a Dutch landscape.
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MAKE/SENSE: Culinary Return (2021–ongoing)
This article is an interweaving of situated dialogues, critical reflections, and expanded knowledges through the lenses of «not knowing in the presence of» (as per Marisol de la Cadena’s essay of 2021) gardens and chacras, and kitchens of steel and earth in Cusco, Peru and Basel, Switzerland. Centring four seasons of exchanges with Isaac Riquelme Mamani (mi querido maestro/my beloved teacher), we look at a recipe, ritual, and seasonal gathering rooted in Peruvian Andean food culture through the Pachamanca (a traditional dish which means comida y ritual bajo la tierra or «pot/meal underneath the earth» in the language of Quechua Runa Simi). In the middle of writing my PhD (which feels more like indigestion) and enacting consent processes, I began to make sense of how Pachamanca and the values and technologies of collective food practices could hold the space to rehearse situated and regenerative relationships with land. So, how and why to cook with land(-scape)? I don’t know, but I can rehearse it…
Ever feel like you are being consumed by the AI data munching overloads of big tech? Ever feel guilty, or at least ambivalent, about test-driving the contours of ChatGPT? This essay, featuring emoji’s superficial chatbot outputs and questions about the in-betweens of speculative and tangible, otherwise of how to side-step the technological tentacle, leaves even the authors wanting more depth.