Travelling Foods

07 Oct - 28 Oct 2025

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Verbs such as to plant, harvest, grind, boil, defrost, dry, cool, chop, mix, peel, serve, squeeze and sauté will be taken as propositions to build a two-way street between food research and artistic creation in the project "Alimento Alimenta" (Food Nourishes), by Nydia Negromonte, included in the KEF Portugal Artistic Residency programme at Casa Mísia.

In Lisbon, Nydia will carry out a survey of the vegetables currently cultivated in the city and, from this record, photograph, draw and develop an installation mixing materials already used in her previous works — such as clay, vegetables, cotton and rice paper — with those that emerge during her research in the Portuguese capital. All this stands in counterpoint to the study she conducted on the cultivation and origin of various foods in Belo Horizonte, Brazil.

“Food, in any of its stages or appearances, has always been a great resource for sociocultural crossroads between peoples. For the development of this project, the main foods originating from the Americas linked to food culture will be used as “ingredients”: cassava, corn, potato, tomato, peanut, beans and chili. Added to them are the “plants in transit”, travelling foods that came and established themselves strongly in Brazilian territory, such as coffee, sugar cane and banana. Within this perspective, I seek possible dialogues with what is cultivated in Lisbon and in Belo Horizonte, the city where I live, says the artist.”

The visual artist investigates the perceptions possible today in the act of preparing or consuming food. She questions whether we are attentive to the rituals linked to them — from their cultivation to their presentation — or to the reflections that can be prompted through them.

 

Nydia Negromonte

Nydia Negromonte was born in Lima, Peru, in 1965, and lives in Brazil. She is a visual artist, with a degree in Drawing from the School of Fine Arts of the Federal University of Minas Gerais (1989), specialising in printmaking (1998) at the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Barcelona, Spain. From 1999 to 2001, she was an artist-in-residence at the HANGAR Atelier in Barcelona, and participated in major fairs and exhibitions such as ARCO (International Contemporary Art Fair) in Madrid, and the Sicart and Antonio de Barnola galleries, both in Barcelona. She has held important solo and group exhibitions in institutions and galleries in Brazil, Venezuela and Peru.