By Photographing Potatoes, Ana Nuñez Rodriguez Uses This Common Ingredient to Question Society and History

In Cooking Potato Stories, the Spanish photographer explores the cultural and historical ties between Europe and Latin America, collecting images and stories around the tuber.

What can a potato tell us about ourselves? What does it say about the construction of national identity? What role can new narratives around it play in how society imagines itself and other worlds? How can translocal stories and food cultures be connected as an inroad to address forgotten colonial legacies and the wider context of political, social, and emotional relationships?

The potato is a way to connect to the collective consciousness and talk about ourselves, a vehicle to reflect on the complexities of the construction of identity. Using the role of the potato as a conductive narrative, I question the power structures behind the construction of identity, based on my own experience moving between Latin America and Europe. Cooking Potato Stories is a transatlantic recipe that mixes the "here" and "there", including different ingredients such as heritage, history, imagination, tradition and autobiography to reflect on how society imagines itself and other worlds based on the stories they tell each other.

We all make sense of our lives through a combination of narratives, a blurred system of ideas that inspires reactions, and determines values, judgments, opinions and behaviours. Today a region does not necessarily have to be a space defined politically or geographically, but a specific space for common stories and experiences, a state of mind rather than a place on the map. Therefore, finding our place means finding our place in a story. I propose an encounter of trans-local stories around the potato that grows an alternative story that questions the ideologies, power and subjectivities behind the narratives. I develop recipes of knowledge that unfold different aspects of the potato's history to push a new collective social memory about it.

Words and pictures by Ana Núñez Rodriguez

Ana Núñez Rodríguez studied Documentary Photography and Contemporary Creation at IDEP Barcelona and received a Postgraduate degree in Photography from the National University of Colombia. She graduated with honours from the Master of Photography and Society at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in The Hague (NL). She was part of Lighthouse 2020-21, a program for upcoming talents at Fotodok, Utrecht (NL). She has been nominated for FUTURES 2022 by Der Greif. Follow her on Instagram and PhMuseum. 

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This feature is part of Story of the Week, a selection of relevant projects from our community handpicked by the PhMuseum curators.