What if black pepper continued to be used as currency?
Peperduur explores the colonial
past and postcolonial capitalist realities of the international black pepper trade by critically
fabulating alternative histories that run tangentially to documented history.
Secondary research along with multi-sited ethnography in and around Shimoga, India and Eindhoven, Netherlands are the primary methods for the research produced in this project, which is supplemented with reading, writing and observations.
Following the ethnographic research, the project then dives into critical fabulation and speculative fabulation as a methodology for design.
This design methodology emerged from the secondary and primary research into the history of international spice trade, which brought up many instances of overlooked experiences of the marginalised people during the colonial ages. It was through Sadiya Hartman’s critical fabulation in writing and Daniella Rosner’s adaptation of the same in design, that emerged naturally out of my research.
workshopping alternative histories
Through an installation of designed artefacts and historical excerpts relates the impacts of this ubiquitous spice on farmers and consumers in India and the Netherlands, Peperduur reflects on the social and economic relationship with black pepper over the centuries reveals the
political factors that shape how everyday food commodities come to be taken for granted.
How inevitable is today’s socio-economic state of labour-intensive agro-commodities then
really?
