COOKING POTATO STORIES

What can a potato tell us about ourselves? What does it say about the construction of national identity? What role can new narratives around it play in how a society imagines itself and other worlds? How can translocal stories and food cultures be connected as an inroad to address forgotten colonial legacies and the wider context of political, social, and emotional relationships?These are some of the questions that lead to the harvesting of stories around the potato that forms Cooking Potato Stories.

This work has its roots in the tension between personal and social identity and the historical and cultural influences on its formation. Using the role of the potato as a conductive narrative, I question the power structures behind the construction of identity, based on my own experience moving between Latin America and Europe. It is a transatlantic recipe that mixes the "here" and "there", which includes different ingredients such as heritage, history, imaginary, tradition and autobiography to reflect on how a society imagines itself and other worlds based in the stories they tell each other.

We all make sense of our lives through a combination of narratives, a blurred system of ideas that inspires reactions, determines values, judgments, opinions and behaviors. Today a region does not necessarily have to be a space defined politically or geographically, but a specific space for common stories and experiences, a state of mind rather than a place on the map. Therefore, finding our place means finding our place in a story and where the plot of these photographs intersect is where my place is located. I propose an encounter of narratives around the potato that grows an alternative story that questions the ideologies, power and subjectivities behind the narratives. I develop recipes of knowledge that unfold different aspects of the potato's history to push a new social memory about it. Cooking Potato Stories drives us in the complex process of how we construct, understand and make sense of ourselves individually and as a collective.



︎Listen to the collection of Potato Stories
︎Cooking Potato Stories Newspapers
      · Switzerland
      · Ireland 
      · Czech Republic
      · Netherlands

︎ PDF version of Cooking Potato Stories Thesis
(epub on request)

The photographic project Cooking Potato Stories proceeds from the premise tha even an ostensibly banal and commonplace object such as the potato may function as a complex cultural artefact. Building upon the author’s original essayisti approach, the potato is here understood not primarily as a foodstuff, but as a medium through which questions of identity, memory, coloniality, and the relationship betwee the local and the global may be articulated. The exhibition thus opens a space for reflection on how meanings are constituted and transformed across time and space.
A key point of departure is the trajectory of the potato from the Andean region o Latin America to Europe during the period of colonial expansion. This displacement is not merely a historical event, but a process that significantly shaped epistemi frameworks, cultural hierarchies, and everyday life. In this sense, the potato becomes a witness to colonialism. In Europe, it was initially met with suspicion; gradually however, it came to occupy a place among the fundamental pillars of the diet.

Within the Czech context, this development acquires a specific character. Potatoe became more widely established only in the eighteenth century, during periods of crop failure and famine, when they were recognised as a reliable source o sustenance. Their gradual integration into everyday life led to the transformation of what was originally an alien crop into one of the most significant elements of loca cuisine and cultural identity. This shift—from rejection to self-evident acceptance—is interpreted within the exhibition as a symptom of a broader mechanism of cultura appropriation and naturalisation: a process in which the foreign is transformed into “our own,” without necessarily reflecting upon its original conditions.

The exhibition is grounded in the premise that the potato constitutes a crucial medium in the formation of collective relations. The everyday acts of cooking,
sharing, and consumption cannot be reduced to utilitarian activities; rather, they ar performative practices through which cultural values, social bonds, and notions of belonging are reproduced and transformed. Within the local context, the potat becomes established as a signifier of modesty, industriousness, and a relationship to the land, while simultaneously bearing the traces of global processes that condition
this apparent self-evidence.

Cooking Potato Stories deliberately transcends disciplinary boundaries, operatin through a hybrid form that interweaves historical narratives, personal testimonies, culinary practices, visual representations, and speculative imagination. It methodological grounding lies in the principle of oral history, which gathers fragments of stories, recipes, field notes, and mythological motifs. Fragmentation here does no constitute a deficiency; rather, it operates as a strategy that disrupts linear, hierarchical models of narration and opens a space for a plurality of perspectives A central dimension of the project is its critical reflection on the coloniality of knowledge. It addresses the historical marginalisation of certai epistemologies—particularly those associated with Indigenous communities of Latin America—which have been systematically delegitimised in favour of Europea models of knowledge production. In this respect, the project aligns itself with broader discourses of decolonisation, seeking to render alternative modes of thought visibl and to create conditions for their equitable encounter. The potato here functions as a connective element linking geographical, temporal, and cultural planes.
Imagination assumes a fundamental role as a tool of knowledge. It is not conceive as an escape from reality, but rather as an active process of constructing new
relations, meanings, and forms of understanding. Visual strategies, fragmentary image compositions, performative gestures, and reinterpretations of traditiona recipes serve to destabilise established assumptions and to open up new possibilities of reading.