Karolina Żyniewicz

(Mexico City, 2019)
One of the best ingredients of Mexican culture is food/cuisine. Many traditional dishes are prepared and served on the street. Street is not just a place of eating it is place where life and death take place. It is not just life and death of human beings. It also involves many visible and invisible non-human actors. In terms of food we have to take into consideration many bacteria participating in the process of food production or being just present in places serving food. They are invisible, so we are not thinking about them at all during eating. Maybe they are responsible for the special taste? What would it be like if we made them visible? Would they appear as a kind of strangers? The framework of the project is to make non-human culture producers visible and known. We did cultivating of bacteria from samples taken beforehand from places of street consumption located in 10 districts of Mexico City: 1. Azcapotzalco, 2. Gustavo A. Madero, 3. Miguel Hidalgo, 4. Cuauhtémoc, 5. Venustiano Carranza, 6. Álvaro Obregón, 7. Benito Juárez, 8. Coyoacán, 9. Tlalpan, 10. Xochimilco. Having inspected bacteria on petri dishes we used them to produce one of polish typical food products - sour cucumbers (one jar for every district) giving bacteria a chance to produce Mexican and Polish culture at the same time.
In collaboration with Tadeo Valencia

Scientific support: Dr Maria Cristina Rodriguez Sánchez, Facultad De Medicina Veterinaria y Zootecnia, UNAM, Roman Alfonso Castillo Diaz, Laboratorio De Biologiá Molecular, UNAM