Fiesta de Fuego

Curated by Juliana Steiner

Bogotá

About

Fiesta de Fuego is a clay oven by Carlos Alfonso installed within the plaza de mercado 7 de Agosto, one of the biggest food markets that brings together local food producers from the countryside in Bogotá.

For the artist, the oven becomes an element that functions both as an object that transforms food through fire, but also has the ability to gather and summon. It becomes a device that can open multiple relationships to highlight some of the exchanges that take place in the plazas de mercado as a space for the collection and exchange of food. The market is a space that makes visible the biodiversity of the country’s agricultural production and the oven, thus becomes a window to explore food security and food sovereignty through the lens of a big city like Bogotá.

The oven is not only executed as a sculptural and culinary object, but also as a place to incite dialogue, a point of concentration and transformation, and an experiment to place hunger as a symptom that unites us and separates us from our species and the others that keep us alive