Muchoindio.com is the name given to the URL associated with the artwork that forms part of the practical component of my PhD dissertation. The webpage houses several multi-channel short video pieces that play automatically and on a continuous loop along with selected still imagery that all make up the webpage. The combination of still and video imagery dynamically loads by scrolling down in order to view more content. The webpage is designed as a complete artwork with the individual elements intended to be viewed in relation to each other.
The video footage focuses on the mouths of eaters which I collected as they engage in the act of eating cake. The conceptual choice for this precise focus draws on the work of Grada Kilomba’s Plantation Memories (2010), and her writing about the mouth of enslaved people working on plantations of the Americas, which looks at various archival sources depicting ways in which the speaking, eating and articulating mouth of the enslaved person was often a site of fear. For Kilomba, the mouth has historically been a site of muteness and torture and as a starting point for profound considerations around the postcolonial condition, around knowledge practices and episteme.
Applied to the South African context, torture through food was a central aspect of racially defined punishment in the colonial and apartheid periods. Pete and Crocker (2010) write about the use of dietary scales associated to issues of both punishment and race from the early stages of its development in the penal system of colonial Natal. Not only were varying dietary scales applied according to a prisoner’s conduct or length of sentence, the dietary scales in colonial Natal were divided into different categories to be applied to the various race groups. Pete and Crocker (2010) argue that is in the area of the prison diet that colonial authorities first adopted a formal system of racial classification in South Africa. In addition to this, in more well-known examples, prisoners’ diets on Robben Island and various other notorious prisons around South Africa, delineated foods, quantities and measurements according to “race.” The notion that racial classification also meant dietary classification and the ordering, valuing and hierarchization of food is noted importantly in Nelson Mandela’s autobiography A Long Walk to Freedom. Food resistance is cited by Mandela as an important tool of humanisation, of demanding his right to choose what kinds of foods he would eat and being able to determine ways of keeping his body healthy.
The racialisation of people and food politics hold important insight into not only to understand the histories of control and management of people and the complex land relations inherited from empire, but also creativity, resilience and survival amidst colonial and apartheid violence. Having provided a list of authors, activists, scholars and chefs who used food as a form of resistance, creativity and humanisation in my literature review, this provides an important point of reference in considering the South African context and my own work. The impact of dispossession in various forms, racialisation of people and forced displacement, alongside the implementation of large scale industrial agriculture and disruption of local foodways and agricultural knowledges, continues to be a background for any consideration of food and cuisine in South Africa. The work of South African sculptor Anton Van Wouw, often considered an iconic piece, his ‘Mealiepap Eater’ sculpture is referenced here in its less perceptible violence. Portraying people as eaters of particular foods and in particular ways, as both Valerie Loichot and Kyla Tompkins illustrate in their scholarship, has a long and sordid history. This work, rather than a classic of South African art, is a clear example of the violence of racialisation and how food and eating in imbricated in this violence in complex ways. I reference this work and consider how it haunts our own sense of what our own cultures and foodways are in South Africa, of what gets called indigenous and what foods are treated with orientalist fascination and desire. Rather than answer these questions, my work hopes to bring them to the fore and inhabit the complex, entangled space of food, in messy, delicious and embodied ways.