Catalina Gómez Alvarez — Kuchen De Manzana

Multimedia installation using apple cake to explore colonialism, revealing the hidden violence within traditions.

 Kuchen De Manzana   Catalina Gómez    Alvarez
by BASE Milano

Kuchen de Manzana transforms an ordinary pleasure, such as cake, into a symbol of aggression and oppression. The act of enjoying coffee and cake served on white porcelain—once exclusive to the white upper class—remains an act embedded in exploitation. The project uses apple cake as both subject and lens to explore the legacy of German settlement in Indigenous Mapuche territories.

The installation features a film that weaves together recipes, legislation, and processes of land dispossession, projected onto paper made from baking paper and apple skins imported from Chile to the Netherlands. The work invites viewers to question inherited rituals and the violence they conceal.

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We Will Design 2026 — HELLO, DARKNESS embraces design as a tool for subverting hierarchies and weaving together ecologies and technologies to imagine the cities and societies of the future.
It is an invitation to recognize the abyss — political, ecological, aesthetic — we’re living in, not as a place of fear, but as a space of regeneration, resistance, and imagination. Darkness here is not absence, but a fertile condition that embraces invisible gestures, marginalized knowledge, and luminous forms of resistance.

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