Remembering, smuggling and returning – Notes on de Appel Kiosk’s two invited projects
Geschreven door Milena Bosnilla Galeano

In de aanloop naar de volgende edities van de Appel Kiosk blikt Milena Bonilla Galeano terug op de twee initiatieven die vorig jaar de marktkraam innamen: het project DOOS ¡No hacemos moneda falsa! van kunstcoöperatie Espacio Estamos Bien en Metti van Wàel El Alouche. Lees het hier (in het Engels)!

DOOS ¡No hacemos moneda falsa!
I met with Mariana and Francisca one afternoon in Spring 2022 to talk about an idea they had been chewing about, which eventually became EEB — Espacio Estamos Bien*.

Camouflage and impermanence were two key words they were attracted to when thinking about their intentions, as their emotional education has been crossed by impermanence and under-current tactics of survival. These terms could represent them obliquely as women of colour and migrants, as artists living and working within uncertainty.

Created in between juggling jobs, the newly named EEB saw the light as an exercise on circulation and play. Along with working, protesting and partying, EEB’s metamorphic character started its tireless campaign for radical companionship and new kinships in Amsterdam.

Lotteries, bingoes, anonymous love letters, logistic services, mobile merch selling. What has been uniting these gamblings and games proposed and realised by EEB during its life, is a relentless need for estar bien as a collective act of resistance. A kind of reminder that at this point and under the current circumstances, to be fine, to be ok is a communal luxury† of sorts. If we are ok we may perhaps have our feet on the Earth, despite Capital’s penetrating efforts of depriving us of that fundamental capacity.

For their collaboration with de Appel Kiosk, EEB invited fellow artist Lorenzo García Andrade to team up with them for an exercise in economies of exchange called DOOS — ¡No hacemos moneda falsa!. The subtitle inevitably took me to the short story by Charles Baudelaire “Counterfeit Money”.

Baudelaire’s text makes a case of how evil can be displayed stupidly. A beggar approaches a pair of friends, begging them for money. One of them gives him what looks like a silver coin, the other friend appears surprised by the generosity of the gift. “It is counterfeit”, replies the giver. What continues is a talk in which the friend that witnessed the donation is appalled to realise that his fellow man really believes he did a good deed by giving a false coin to the beggar, and that on top of that, perceived himself achieving a great little business in not losing money.

As Baudelaire’s text may have been an exercise in showing the reader the moral misconduct of the whole charity business, the question with EEB’s intervention in the Kiosk is towards charity’s anathema: solidarity.

I would like to walk towards the connection between gifts and gestures on a micro-scale as basic exercises in solidarity. Within DOOS, you, as an exchanger, will choose anything that pops up from the boxes displayed at the Kiosk hosting EEB. This might be a red paint can with an interesting past, the lyrics of a forgotten song, a sticker with the picture of the Earth on it, a collection of hand-made toys, a telephonic lecture on decolonising Marcel Mauss, a piece of gossip sealed inside an envelope, an unmatched pair of earrings. After selecting an item, you offer something in return. It can be an object or an action, but most importantly, it is always time. And taking your time nowadays is daring to breathe‡.

This set of offered items for exchange have been collected by EEB-DOOS from friends all around the world. Most important for EEB and the project DOOS is the build up and embracing of potential relations, within a horizon towards collaboration. An affective network that travels in a box hatching in Amsterdam, loaded with the imprint of the universes these objects have belonged to.

Even the tiniest of objects hatching from the dozen change us and get changed by us§. Who knows if the object someone is receiving in Amsterdam coming from Tallinn was actually due to return to those hands as part of its dream of coming back? Perhaps our objects can finally exert their right to cry their worth in actions of retribution. I give you a snorkel figurine, but in exchange it will finally receive a name. I send you two identical postcards, but one shall return with a message. I send a piece of gossip, in your hands it becomes the plot of that night’s collective dream.

Wàel El Alouche’s Metti
In the process of embracing an ecology of relations, there’s something that always takes us back to memories circulating the body, more often than not, without our full awareness, as for all the information process taking place in the act of eating, patriarchal urgency♠ doesn’t grant us the appropriate time to really digest.

Waèl’s idea for Metti started to brew when he was cooking at the Fou Fow ramen restaurant in Amsterdam. This activity in cooking becoming relational art, as a smuggling of meaning starting from need, was an actual survival tactic. Waèl pushed his cooking into a series of events at Fou Fow. Supported by the restaurant owner, in one inaugural action, Waèl and his mother made a cooking event: Leblebi soup. From that point on, the spark of Metti grew into varied iterations.

Ancestry is at the core of Metti — the name of the project invokes the nickname of Waèl’s grandmother. Traced back to its Amazigh roots, Metti is honouring mothers and grandmothers, embodying feminine power, its capacity of bringing people together, and the passing on of practices and knowledge whose roots are fundamentally collective.

The stopover of Metti at the Kiosk was focused on the distribution of food smuggled from Tunisia, food that embodies the capacity to infiltrate our memory with culinary information able to bypass passport control. Metti infuses the Kiosk with the imprint of a piece of luggage that crossed borders stuffed with stories of pre-colonial trade between Northern Africa and Europe. A summoning of spices, oil, dates, cous-cous and other ingredients spoken in various languages and dialects as living heritage. As practices of cooking will definitely survive us, Metti allies with ingredients-beings in practicing ancestry in its present tense.

Much of Metti’s process of becoming is ingrained in intention. You may be tasting olive oil with a specific artisanal origin made by Waèl’s extended kin together with harissa and chickpeas in a leblebi broodje, while stories are shared between Metti’s friends and passers-by at the Kiosk. Under an apparent innocent exchange, a spell for recognition has haunted the precious ingredients. Intention, therefore, is the intangible gift.

Smuggling food from Waèl’s Tunisia, becomes dangerous not because a bottle of oil, spices and herbs are breaking capitalist-colonial rules and trespassing, but because intention would inevitably make a collective metabolic difference if we embrace where and how, under which economic, political and affectionate circumstances the plants-becoming ingredients were taken care of in the first place. From the moment that we, as clients, exchangers and listeners, engage with the food offered, we are open to its soil. The story may or may not be expressed by speech, but its memory traverses the body as the diner invites it by taste and digestion, inevitably.

As Metti manifests a rekindling of diasporic temporalities, invoking Ancestry and survival as an invitation, an opportunity is created for crafting conversation, food and storytelling into each other. Many seeds are planted with each encounter, Metti hopes for fertile spaces for them to sprout.

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*Estamos Bien can translate to “we are doing fine”, we are doing ok. Its founders and main care takers are Mariana Jurado Rico and Francisca Khamis Giacoman.

†The term Communal Luxury traces back to Eugène Pottier, artist, poet, and important actor during the 1871 Paris Commune. Kristin Ross highlights the term coined by Pottier as an umbrella covering the emancipatory potential of the Artist’s Federation aims for the Commune. Communal Luxury meant that art should be treated as a commons and should be present in everyone’s everyday life. Ross’ work Communal Luxury is published by Verso Books, 2015.

‡The last 30 years in the history of art practices has witnessed different exercises in connection with bartering and exchange micro-economies, all with their own particular ways of proceeding, e.g. C.A.C.A.O. (Cooperativa Autónoma de Comercio Artístico de Obras), the project Day-to-Day from Carolina Caycedo, Time Bank by e-flux and Time Divisa from Antonio Vega Macotela among others.

§Thank you Octavia Butler for The Parable of the Sower’s first words. First published by Four Walls, Eight Windows in 1993.

♠For a clearer navigation of urgency as a tool of oppression see here.

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Mila Bonilla Galeano is beeldend kunstenaar, docent en onafhankelijk onderzoeker. Ze is geboren in Bogotá en woont en werkt in Amsterdam. Haar artistieke praktijk richt zich momenteel op epistemisch kolonialisme en de verschillende manieren waarop dit van invloed is op levensvormen, taal, beeldtaal, sociale ordeningen en de perceptie van geschiedenis. Bonilla is ook geïnteresseerd in informatie, praktijken en kennis die bepaalde vragen stellen over taal en agency, en hoe deze principes verankerd zijn in de manier waarop economisch beleid onder het kapitalisme functioneert.