Echoes of Ingredients #4 | workshop whit Mariana Martínez Balvanera

25.06.2026

Mariana Martínez Balvanera is a designer and artist working at the intersection of participatory art, spatial, and social design, engaging methodologies from public art, agroecology, food and collective pedagogies. Her recent explorations focus on re-threading relationships to territory through food as a way of place(world)making. In 2018 she co-founded @cocina_colaboratorio a mobile and on-site project that brings together farmers, scientists, creatives and cooks to prototype trans-disciplinary explorations of our food systems.

Embodiments of Huautli emerges from an ongoing research into cosmopolitan Chenopodium and Amaranthus plants, known in Mexico as Quelites, and their multiple domestications across the world. As widely dispersed plant relatives, amaranths and goosefoots repeatedly appear at the edges of cultivation: thriving through drought, emerging in disturbed soil, and blurring boundaries between crop and weed. Through the lens of Amaranth and its stories of place-ment and dis-placement, we will explore how cultures of devotion become embodied through food, ritual, and collective acts of place-making. Inspired by the Mexica concept of the ixiptla (a living embodiment or vessel through which a force becomes present) we will use amaranth to create edible sculptures of invented deities for our contemporary world. Together, we will ask: What kinds of beings deserve devotion today? What forces of life are absent from our rituals, yet sustain our existence? What becomes present through a collective sculpture? Through the making of tzoalli, a dough traditionally prepared from amaranth seeds and honey, we will collectively imagine new ixiptlahuan: embodiments of those we want to cherish. The workshop concludes with a shared reflection on what it means to embody, nourish, and become responsible for the worlds we wish to sustain.

For the edible sculptures, we will use honey produced by beekeeper Erika Mayr @stadtbienenhonig , who will also lead a honey tasting session at the end of the workshop.