Echoes of Ingredients | workshop by Walla Capelobo

7.02.206

CANTADORA is pleased to invite you to “confluence: reading manioca” a workshop by WALLA CAPELOBO

as part of “Echoes of Ingredients” curated by Valerio Del Baglivo

7 February, 4-7 p

Image design by Rodrigo Saturnino

Walla Capelobo (Berlin) is a transfeminist and anticolonial researcher and artist. Through pottery, performance, pedagogy, and storytelling, they explore Indigenous cosmologies and the potentialities of spiral time. At Cantadora, they will present confluence, a collective, food-based activity inspired by the quilombola thinker Nêgo Bispo and centered on manioca.

Understanding colonialism as deeply connected to the current climate crisis invites us to look at practices of resistance and adaptation emerging from territories still shaped by its effects. Manioca is one such example: a resilient root whose Indigenous cultivation reflects long-standing strategies of survival and autonomy. Also known as cassava, yuca, or aipim, manioca is widely cultivated across the Americas and traveled to Africa through the reverse routes of the transatlantic slave trade. There, it was transformed and generated new knowledges, uses, and cosmograms of possibility on the other side of the Atlantic.

Drawing on Nêgo Bispo’s concept of confluence—where difference becomes strength rather than division—this activity engages manioca in a material and relational way. For Bispo, encountering the other is not a loss but a process of mutual strengthening through converging, anti-colonial knowledges. Participants come together to share their affective relationships to land and roots, brought into confluence—forming a circle of exchange and mutual strengthening. By engaging with the transatlantic stories carried by manioca, the group reflects on food and spiritual sovereignty, grounded in embodied knowledge and the practice of sharing root-based recipes.

Confluence is curated by Valerio Del Baglivo as part of a series of group cooking sections titled Echoes of Ingredients.  Echoes of Ingredients explores how the histories of trade, empire, colonialism, and migration resonate through the flavors and trajectories of a single ingredient — and what these resonances can teach us about forms of liberation, imagination and empowerment.

Walla Capelobo  is a dark forest and fertile mud. A multidisciplinary artist experimenting with ceramics, installations, videos, texts, workshops, and performances. Capelobo’s work is characterized by time, the flow of physical and/or spiritual energy surrounding the earth through the exchange of minerals, technologies and regenerations. Their practice addresses sensitive issues of existence, supported by Afro-Indigenous South American technologies, speculative ecologies, present-day archaeologies, dreams, and delusions. Capelobo has participated in residencies such as Organismo TBA21 – Academy Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (Madrid, Spain), South to South: A Meeting on African and Afro-Diasporic Technologies (Brazil, DR Congo, and Germany), AI Anarchies at the Junge Akademie, Akademie der Künste (Berlin, Germany), LabVerde (Amazon, Brazil), Matéria Abierta (Mexico City, Mexico), CACis (Barcelona, Spain), Pivô Arte e Pesquisa (São Paulo, Brazil), and the Institute for Postnature (Madrid, Spain).