IMBISS: A Working Group - Episode 3: Vanilla

The third “IMBISS: A Working Group” episode, led by marc norbert hörler, will be focusing on vanilla. The workshop, which will focus on vanilla as an olfactory material, will explore its histories, its colonial and chemical extraction, as well as aspects of its cultivation. We will also be discussing its mass production for perfumery and cuisine, while we smell different extracts and evaluate them.

Please bring with you something that relates to vanilla, be it a memory, a recipe, a story, a feeling - something easy to share.

IMBISS: A Working Group

“IMBISS: a working group” is a series of study groups, workshops and performances around the kitchen table that think food as that which is simultaneously life sustenance, a cultural ecosystem and a political product. Its curriculum looks at the intersections between eating practices, culinary histories, food production and trade, and global politics.

Each of the series’ sessions will focus on a different food item or practice and open up its political history. They will be looking at how these intersect with colonial histories, global capitalist trade routes, processes of racialisation, gender politics, economic uneven development, histories of revolutionary organising, and others.

This project is being developed with the support of the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung.

marc norbert hörler has developed this research with the support of Pro Helvetia.