Leone Contini’s The Potato Eaters at Goleb* – Amsterdam

A very rich bio-diversity is today compressed into the narrow space of the contemporary European city, the landing point of the migration routes. Here we can find potatoes and tubers of many forms and origins; Roots indeed, and cultural belongings, daily claimed by the immigrant communities in their culinary practices, as domestic rituals of reconnection with their origins. The contemporary Potato Eaters are not anymore part of a single and homogeneous religious/linguistic community as it was in the anthropological landscape depicted by Van Gogh. In my proposal this icon of Dutchness would be re-declined through a convivial action of tuber-cooking, tuber-lecturing and tuber-eating. Even the traditional Dutch potatoes should have, at some point in the past, slipped from the realm of otherness (as a foreign, American product) to the realm of familiarity. Let it happen again with yucca, cassava, yum, yam, inhume, khamalu, tarul, taro, etc.

Leone Contini, “De Aardappeleters – The Potato Eaters” at Goleb*, Amsterdam