Reading Palm / WORKSHOP with Elia Nurvista

20.10.2025

WORKSHOP / Monday October 20, 6–8 PM

We’re happy to announce that next week, multidisciplinary artist Elia Nurvista (Yogyakarta) will be at Cantadora to lead Reading Palm, a collective reading and tasting workshop held in conjunction with Taring Padi exhibition.

About the Workshop:

Since 2020, artist Elia Nurvista has been exploring the complexities surrounding the economics and politics of palm oil. Her research engages with long-standing debates around ecological devastation, labor exploitation, and land conflicts affecting Indigenous communities in the Global South. At the same time, she interrogates the promotion of palm oil as a “green” solution through its use in biofuels—marketed as a technical fix for global warming and peak oil.

At Cantadora, Elia presents Reading Palm, a participatory workshop that investigates the circulation and value of palm oil through shared readings and tastings. Participants will read excerpts from Max Haiven’s Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire (2022), with a focus on the chapter “Whose Surplus”. Through the act of eating and reading together, the workshop will explore how palm oil binds surplus bodies—those rendered exploitable or disposable under capitalism.

This collective digestion reimagines palm oil: not just as a colonial commodity, but as a medium for hospitality, dialogue, and rethinking systems of global production, value, and consumption.

Reading Palm is curated by Valerio Del Baglivo as part of the ongoing series Echoes of Ingredients, a group of cooking sessions that explore how the histories of trade, empire, colonialism, and migration are embodied in the flavors and journeys of individual ingredients—guiding us toward practices of liberation, imagination, and empowerment.