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Abstract

What are specific ways performance contributes to discourses about hunger? One promising intervention is by decolonizing the relationship between food and the land. This essay examines Obsoleta (Obsolete), a multimedia happening by Colombian artistic collective Lenguajes Gastronómicos, as a force of decolonization against industrialized food, economic injustice, and extractivism. We invite readers to think of Colombia's mojojoy (an Amazonian larva) as a source of decolonial knowledge, as an indigenous food source, and as a disruptor of contemporary agribusinesses. Early in the twentieth century, the United Food Company introduced the African Oil Palm to Colombian's Pacific, setting the stage for escalating violations of territorial rights, deforestation, and ecological disasters. For the past hundred years, agribusinesses have fought the mojojoy as a pest that destroys their profitable crop. Obsoleta rebels against the colonial conception of the mojojoy as a biological pest indicating that the palm is the true invasive organism. Colombia's mojojoy is Obsoleta's protagonist. Waiters serve a meal with live mojojoys as the main dish. After fighting their disgust, guests ultimately taste the moving larva. It is a performance of entomophagy that questions colonized assumptions about food. Obsoleta's scenography performs as visual dramaturgy juxtaposing video-art sequences of agribusiness marketing strategies with videos of ultra-processed foods. Our analysis unpacks hunger as a failure of imagination about what we eat and our colonized guts. The Colombian and Mexican scholars of this essay propose a decolonial framework to understand how colonization has made Latin America hungry. Indigenous and local communities have eaten insects like the mojojoy in the Americas for millennia. Obsoleta visualizes a dramatic reimagining for the insect: the mojojoy as disruptor of contemporary industrialized food dynamics and the mojojoy as a food of the future. Although it might be an unwinnable battle for Colombia's invertebrate, it can still damage the industrial food industry by eating it from the insides and by exposing its colonial history.