The Brazilian feijoada opens the journey of MIMIMI Space. Ricardo de Paula invites his guests for a banquet. By offering feijoada, a disputed symbol of Brazilian national cuisine and identity, he sets the stage (and the table) for discussions about the tensions behind narratives of harmony and the violent culture and everyday lives in Brazil. The community at the table here is informed by shared concerns regarding anti-racism, food justice and body politics from a feminist and decolonial perspective. Renata Motta (sociologist/FU Berlin), Sandra Bello (activist) and dancers from CLEANSE/NU will give artistic, academic and activist impulses for a discussion between all the attendants.

The Brazilian feijoada was constructed as a symbol for the coming together of different peoples, African, European, and American Indigenous peoples, and the resulting cultural richness of Brazil – where de Paula and a large part of the MIMIMI team come from. No doubt feijoada is a result of the exchange of peoples, cuisines and crops between world regions over the centuries. But just like any myth of a national identity, feijoada turns out to be a disputed symbol. Within a dominant discourse on Brazilian identity in which racial hierarchies are downplayed, the construction of feijoada as a national dish can be understood as a white project on closer inspection, as the often sketched image of the harmonious, multicultural Brazilian society does not correspond to its structural racism. Como podemos decolonizar a feijoada?

This and other topics related to feijoada are the subject of discussion – in a shared space that requires courage from all participants to question their own position. This is not a safe space, but a brave space, in which there is no unquestioned “we”, but nevertheless, the host will realize his utopian wish to assemble people who are willing to eat and digest together the tensions and possibilities of building worlds otherwise. What do we eat, what do we have to digest and what do we no longer want to swallow? The feijoada is also significant in another respect: with its long preparation time, it is a meal that represents the opposite of today’s trend towards fast food. This is the model for the artistic work in the project too. The individual events are usually preceded by years of the participants’ working with the respective themes, here they come together in a new way.