From a critical look at a global food system that, according to her, “swallows us”, the artist and social activist Marina Monsonís stars in the new chapter of the podcast Stay to eat. Monsonís, who was asked to take the kitchen to MACBA and who combines the workshops she coordinates there with multiple interconnected activities (“in some way I am a connector of people and projects”), talks about her childhood and the transformation of Barceloneta, his neighbourhood, and of a city that has been forgetting its seafaring roots.
In a review of her career, Marina Monsonís tells how various learning disorders, such as dyslexia and dyscalculia (“I have not been able to learn my ID or the phone I have had for 20 years”) made it difficult for her to advance in the educational system of this country (“there was no bad intention and I had a wonderful teacher in kindergarten, but she didn’t understand what was happening to me and I spent two years in a corner of the class learning to distinguish 5 from 6”) and how she finally managed to study art in a reputed English university.
Monsonís, promoter of projects from which she weaves networks of complicity, reviews the memories of her neighborhood, where her first contact with death was the day she stopped seeing the neighbor who was mending the fishing nets that were left abandoned on the floor of the terrace that she saw from her house.
The artist explains her relationship with the world of graffiti and recipes, which she began to combine as a result of an intervention in a marginal neighborhood in Baltimore (in the state of Maryland, USA); She worked on it in workshops with people of different ages and backgrounds, of whom she says that “each one arrives with their own culinary memories and when they meet, a crevasse of creativity opens up.”
He reviews how the Barcelona coast has changed, the transformation of which he was able to see in real time from the vantage point of that tiny family apartment into a very tall apartment building with a panoramic view and from where he attended the transformation of the Barcelona Olympic Games. “At an urban level, the city did open up to the sea, there is no doubt, but one thing is that an urban intervention gives you more direct access to the beach and the other is that you really make some institutional policies that generate a connection with the sea”.
He believes that Barcelona in 1992 paid little attention to its seafaring roots and there was no strategy to protect trades related to the sea. “Neither she nor she was attentive to these global relationships, including the effects of fishing extractivism and the consequences on human lives on the different coasts.” She herself, a descendant of fishermen, of grandmothers who wove the nets and the daughter of a stevedore, explains that she grew up “in a neighborhood by the sea but disconnected from all that wealth beyond going to the beach and swimming, because before on the beach they I swam”.
He considers it absurd that forgotten fish species still have to be promoted: “We would not have to recover forgotten fish because they should not have been forgotten. It seems to me nonsense and a sample of that disconnection from the sea. If you open Barcelona to the sea and the men and women of Barcelona do not know that there is a fish market, something has gone wrong”.
Marina Monsonís wants to make a claim: “This so chic world of gastronomy, in a seaside city like Barcelona, ??has not taken care of its surroundings. How can you talk so much about creativity and gastronomic values ??and that the environment, the sea or the forests that surround the city, are neglected”. And although he believes that sometimes the leaders of haute cuisine have jumped on the bandwagon of species recovery or the use of invasive species to bring it to their land and give an image of concern for sustainability, he qualifies: “When I talk about responsibilities I am not just referring to the restoration, I am talking about the educational system, because I went to a school in front of the sea and nobody ever explained anything to us about the sea”.
For her, joint work must be done, “a work by all people with public responsibility and political governance.” For her, in the same way that the consumption of other species beyond salmon and the four that are usually bought must be promoted, “you have to explain to the boys and girls that you have to make a responsible consumption, because we have a brutal problem and the sea ??does not give of itself due to overexploitation”.
Both in fishing and in other food matters, she considers that the visible figures in the kitchen “have promoted a kitchen that is disconnected from the territories, even though there are some beautiful and truly connected projects”. According to her, “they have appropriated of issues such as forgotten fish or invasive species, making that something exclusive, when it is not about that, but rather that we understand that we must make a kitchen linked to the territories with criteria of climatic and social justice. not be at odds with creativity, nor with what is interesting. But I think that archetypes of food have been created in haute cuisine”. Although he assures that he does not like “catastrophic, limiting and blaming” narratives, the reality is that we are experiencing a crisis and We will not be able to continue operating as before, because the planet has limits and we cannot do what we want”.
