NAMo
2. Cosmic Implications of Food from Abya Yala
From Final Exam Contextual Design MA - Design Academy Eindhoven
‘The Cosmic Implications of Food from Abya Yala’ is an invitation to pause, reflect, and inhabit the decolonial potential of everyday acts of care. Inspired by woman-headed households in Colombia, where food preparation and sales often become acts of resistance, designer Natali Aguirre Montaña reframes the domestic not as a lesser or private realm, but as a site of political and cosmic significance.
Drawing on feminist-decolonial thought, the project threads ancestral knowledge into present awareness through material and metaphorical engagement with corn and textiles. The installation forms an ‘abigarrada’ (layered, contradictory, mestiza) landscape, inhabiting the ‘borderland’ between ancestry and modernity, public and private, male and female. It asserts that food, especially the ‘arepa’, an ancestral corn-based bread, is not only a cultural artefact, but a cosmic connector sustaining lives, identities, and histories in Abya Yala (the decolonial name for the Americas).
This project will be exhibited in the Dutch Design Week 2025, as part of the Design Academy Eindhoven Graduation Show Pavilion.
Location: Microstad, Professor Dr Dorgelolaan 2, 5611 BA Eindhoven, Netherlands
Dates: 18-26 October, 2025