Mobile kitchen: Nixtamalisation Laboratory

At the Gastronomy Guild we believe that certain long procedures of traditional food preparation carry within themselves intangible performative knowledge, and that if we take the time to go through them they bring us closer to popular ritual forms from our contemporaneity. In this session of the Cocina ambulante we will do a laboratory on nixtamalisation, a traditional process of cereal preparation, especially panís (maize), which is carried out in various Latin American cultures. As these everyday rituals are a way of creating culture and community, we have invited Las Jamaiconas, a collective that combines art and activism through cooking from a migrant and anti-racist perspective. With them we asked ourselves, what is an ancestral process doing in the art centre, if this process implies breaking down the structures of the “corn” to make it more digestible and assimilate its properties to the maximum, then: can an art institution like the Santa Mònica be nixtamalised?