Network Projects / Common Ground / Ecotone: Chagras, Payaos, Camellones / Fiesta de Fuego

Fiesta de Fuego

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

Curated by

Juliana Steiner

Location

Bogotá

Resources

Other Media

Biographies

Carlos Alfonso
Carlos Alfonso is a visual artist interested in the anecdotal, in orality, and in the multiple narratives that can be woven from abstraction and speculation. In his practice, the pictorial opens up possibilities for dialogue and is joined with other frameworks of interpretation such as sculpture, text, cuisine, and editorial work. This has led him to collaborate with other people in different contexts, such as in the residence of Flora ars+natura (2019) where his studio extended into the kitchen as a space for experimentation around food and hospitality. As a result of this experience, he published the book Mutual Worlds, the kitchen as a workshop (2020) in co-authorship with the anthropologist Christina Consuegra. He currently lives in the countryside, tries to grow edible plants, and sometimes makes ovens and sculptures in adobe, which are treated as pieces to be activated amid culinary encounters around the fire.