The Mexican collective is selected by Campo Adentro / Inland collective as part of ArtReview’s annual spotlight on individuals whose work is worthy of more attention
Created in 2016, the Cocina Colaboratorio collective in Mexico brings around the kitchen table communities of people dedicated to agriculture, cooking, art, design, architecture and research to exchange knowledge, design and implement actions for a sustainable food future. It is a laboratory of collective creation and joint experimentation that seeks to reconcile the care of nature with food production and diverse ways of life.
Based on fieldwork gathered within a university context, together with other cultural practitioners, Cocina Colaboratorio’s actions carry across three territories: Loma Bonita (Chiapas), Santo Domingo Tomaltepec (Oaxaca) and Xochimilco (Mexico City). Focusing their work in what they call ‘arenas’ – the Kitchen, the Experimental Plot and the Living Biocultural Archive – they also share research-action projects, public programmes and exchanges through projects like ‘Extended Table’, a series of collaborations with other collectives.
In their own words, ‘Within these arenas, learning communities come together to imagine alternative futures and explore new ways of knowing, doing and being, through local leadership and collective action. Future generations of hopeful and committed community, artistic and academic leaders are being nurtured. Our efforts resonate and inspire a network that reaches from the local to the global.’
Cocina Colaboratorio started as a joint effort to design spaces and tools for communication and action to strengthen the socioecological situation in the southern Lacandon Jungle, Chiapas. Based on the field experience of the project and its growth, the collective places considerable attention on compiling a collaborative protocol for care guides, learning by trial and error.
Through various creative approaches, the collective seeks out methods for an inclusive transformation of the food system that will benefit the local inhabited landscapes and microeconomies. At Cocina Colaboratorio, participants in the projects bring art ‘to the table’, to the fields and the everyday, in order to glimpse the imaginaries that constitute those spaces, creating affective and reflective moments in which alternative narratives and collective meanings are generated. One project, ‘Bio-sculptures to Nourish the Tongues of Water’ (2024), involved creating sculptures from clay, flour, mountain soil and rainwater, letting them ferment and then placing them in the waterways of Mexico City, as offerings and attempts towards bioremediation of polluted waters. Individual proposals, from students or residents, address issues of gender, food security, culinary innovation, agrobiodiversity, collective imaginaries, circular spaces and so on, through participatory, collaborative and collective action research proposals.
This transdisciplinary and innovative approach has further inspired projects like Estudio de Campo, a nonprofit organisation in Valdivia, Chile. Formed in 2021, this women-led collective promotes interdisciplinary practices to restore, inhabit and engage with the environment in intimacy and reflection. Their projects have included land stewardship commissions, working with students of landscape architecture to design an urban garden focused on water management during the seasonal extremes of floods and droughts; Biblioteca Tupa is an initiative that seeks to create a publicly accessible space to store the bibliographic collections of influential researchers in the fields of ethnopharmacology and ethnopharmacognosy. All the while, some of the ways in which Estudio de Campo finances its initiatives is by recovering apple orchards and making use of the riverine transportation system to produce Sidra Señorita, a delicious demi-sec cider, while coproducing publications such as Superreinos, a digital science-fiction magazine combining literature, natural sciences and speculative thinking.
As with Cocina Colaboratorio, the artists are immersed in particular and unique contexts where platforms allow both pedagogical and applied theoretical practices. At the same time, artists, scientists and locals discuss the ways in which their processes circulate and are put into practice, we could say, beyond the proposals. All this with the aim of appropriating, interpreting, problematising and constructing a space that meets the expectations that arise from art, territory and social change.
Explore the 2026 Future Greats
Cocina Colaboratorio is a transdisciplinary collective based in Mexico City, Oaxaca and Chiapas. It gathers artists, designers, architects, farmer communities, scientists and chefs around the kitchen table to exchange knowledge, design and take action towards sustainable food futures.
Selected by Campo Adentro / Inland, collective, Madrid and Northern Spain
