**Please note: This is an IN-PERSON event, taking place at the Bard Graduate Center 38 West 86 Street, New York, NY
Event Description:
Connect with the plant behind the commodity! Join New York-based education platform and artist collective Herban Cura for knowledge-shares about sugar and coffee—active matter often consumed as fuel for productivity. As two of the most globally commodified plants, sugar and coffee have been taken out of their original ecologies, often in ways that perpetuate violence against the plants as well as their human stewards, the many peoples who have been impacted by colonization across the globe. Even as colonial violence persists, many living practices that depend on plant-people relations continue to exist and evolve.
In one knowledge-share, you can explore coffee through a traditional roasting and sipping ceremony from the Ethiopian tradition offered by Tigist Kelkay. In the other, Christine Brooks will guide you through pressing fresh sugar cane to taste on site while looking at different ways in which this plant has been refined and commodified.
Herban Cura, curated by Antonia Estela Pérez, Sebastián Pérez, and Em McCann Zauder, seeks to create access to ancestral and plant wisdom—both through the rematriation of Indigenous life-ways and through remembrance and reclamation of how to live in solidarity with the earth and with our human and more-than-human kin.
Event organized by guest curator Kristen Joy Owens.
Proof of COVID vaccination, photo ID, and the use of masks are required of all visitors to BGC Gallery. Please see our visitor policies for all up-to-date COVID policies.
You will have the opportunity to choose between 2 knowledge shares:
Ethiopian Coffee Ritual with Tigist Kelkay
An invitation to a visceral experience offering a window to take time and find slowness in everyday life and magic in familiar moments.
The famed Ethiopian coffee ritual is an experience for all the senses. Conversation flowing, the aroma and sound of the roasting beans, the wafting of burning incense, passing tiny cups full of the precious liquid while being careful not to spill any of it, and that first sip that erases all fatigue and worries.
Coffee was discovered in Ethiopia growing wild, many centuries ago. As the birthplace of coffee, the ritual of preparing it has reached a fine point. Rituals can last for hours as the coffee (buna) is roasted, ground, brewed, and drunk. It is an essential safe place for the young and the old to meet, where topics such as politics, community, and gossip are discussed.
A Meditation on Sugarcane, Sweetness & History with Christine Brooks
An invitation to trace the social and political trajectory of sugarcane as a medicine, food and commodity - and to understand and recall right relationship with sweetness as our birthright.
In plants, sugars are energy. Many of the medicinal plants whose powers are held in roots we know to harvest in the fall, after plants have sent their energy back into the ground. Polysaccharides, powerful, immuno-modulating compounds found in everything from medicinal mushrooms to marshmallow root, are long chains of sugars that are water-soluble, moistening and nourish the immune system.
Travel through time as we trace the bittersweet lineage of Sugar Cane–one of the most important agricultural commodities of our millenia. This discussion explores the cumulative effects and inextricable tension between colonialism, sugar cultivation, and its status as a cultural juggernaut.
Other details:
the Bard Graduate Center 38 West 86 Street, New York, NY.
May 14, 2022. 12:00 – 3:30 pm EST.
Adults $15; Seniors/Students $12; Free for Members/People with disabilities and their caregivers