Art project picture 05
After 'I' was being baptised on the pile of wood and walked of, I returned with more maize flour and cassava flour to baptizing the woodpile until it totally turned white, into a white element, my eleventh white element I created in my artist career.
Working with maize and cassava flour makes it even more site specific because these crops are the main reason of deforestation as agriculture land is all too often created by cutting down forests. But I also mean it here in an economic and political way. For example: Corn flour (white) in Zambia and Malawi are subject of political influence (price and distribution) and corruption (in Malawi there is a food shortage right now (rain season 2017) because the emergency stock (enough for 3 years) was sold before there was an emergency, to benefit a few). A more personal observation (but far more less worse that the first): in the village we stayed in Zanzibar we were drinking instant coffee while they grow coffee there but it was not for sale in the surrounding islands and villages because it is to expansive to them. Saying they are cheap labour, but not given what they harvest, because it is meant for export and others to make more profit. This effect is also seen a lot in the ‘cacao beans farming’.
As we all know the same food items are not equally distributed all over the world mainly because of a strange and complex combination of supply and demand, politics, international economy, local economy and/or due to high transport costs (especially when a country is land locked).