How to perceive our territory sensorially through food? What human-nature relationships develop around cultivation and harvesting? How to reciprocate this knowledge exchange?
Maras K´ampa’s Asociation is made up of 12 women from Maras town. They use the corn husk, in quechua called k’ampa, to create difrente handicrafts like baskets, rugs, vases, sugar bowls and other utilitarian and decorative objects.
The ancestral Andean plant, stigmatized for its uses in the narcotics industry, brings its nutritional and organoleptic properties to the world of food.Coca
Khipuy is a project under development in collaboration with Constanza Gainza, architect, through the alliance between Chazz and Mater Iniciativa, and carried out jointly with the community of Kackllaraccay in Moray. The community of Kackllaraccay has been working together with Mater Iniciativa for two years, developing different projects in agriculture and textiles.
In June 2022, I arrived at Mil Centro to carry out the pilot project entitled “Literary Peru: Promoting Critical Citizenship through Reading and Creative Writing” with the surrounding farming communities of Mullak’as-Misminay and Kacllaraccay. This is a project funded by the Humanities Council of Princeton University, the institution for which I work as a professor of Spanish. In the long term, my goal is to provide a tool to generate social development through access to literary materials through two strategies. The first is to implement a mobile community library and the second is to encourage the production of texts created by the community members themselves, so that reading practices go hand in hand with writing.
“Yesterday we worked well, in my farm, with my mother’s machine. I wanted you to see what I worked on so that you could take my picture, that’s what I wanted (she laughs). While I was working I wanted you to take my picture yesterday.”
I think it is easy to fool ourselves into thinking that “We are what we eat”, but I believe that we are rather everything with which we dress the act of eating. Every action, gesture, tableware, attire or way of sitting at the table has more to say about us than what we consume. Ingredients and techniques are exchanged, learned, but the way of eating them, of adorning the act itself, takes a subtle form in our cultural imaginary.
A woman carries her lliclla accompanied by her daughter, dressed in her traditional garments and the illusion of being able to dance for her lord. The image seems unchanged, a picture unchanged over time. It is not.
Valeria Figueroa is a sculptor from PUCP, specializing in clay and metal. She currently lives in Lima, where she teaches ceramics. As part of Mater Iniciativa’s art and culture area, Valeria developed a two-week ceramics workshop with a group of women from Mullaka’s Misminay community, neighboring Mil.
If you aren’t looking for it, you may not see the structure that houses MIL Restaurant and its laboratory arm, Mater Iniciativa—this despite the fact that it overlooks the famous and heavily trafficked agricultural terraces at Moray, those concentric formations attributed to Inka cultivators from centuries ago. And yet the building grows out of the natural highland environment: its adobe clay bricks are taken from the surrounding earth and baked by the Andean sun; its carefully thatched roof points to the local pastures and fields that dress the hillsides.
It was the day of the Kacllaracay festival, when I met the people of the community for the first time. Among them Ceferina Atau, who would eventually become a very important part of my life, growth, knowledge and research process.
It was only a few minutes before dusk. The day had cooled down as the evening was falling. After a long day of work I walk to the little house we have 100 meters from MIL where we sleep. I take off my shoes, prepare a chamomile tea and open my computer to start typing, and suddenly I see a person waving at me through the window. I go out to look because I could not recognize him. It was Egidio Amau. “To eat!” he says, motioning for us to go together. And all the tiredness of the day disappeared. I nimbly entered the house and put on my shoes with all the enthusiasm in the world. I took a flashlight, put on my chullo to keep my head warm, and closed my jacket. “Hakuchis”- I said, as I hurried to follow him.
We visited the different areas of the International Potato Center in La Molina to learn how to create botanical samples. We were accompanied by Dr. Fanny Vargas, a specialist in the area and a great teacher in the area of mounting.