Memories of the Forgotten Mother

Storytelling Performance Tour

Curated by Monokino as part of the Beaufort Art Triennial 2021

Ostend, Belgium

7-8 August 2021

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We invite you to go on a journey in the city of Ostend, to undust the history of chocolate by listening to the ancestral stories of cacao and to activate the embodied memory as a collective decolonial healing.

Europe is the biggest chocolate consumer in the world, and Belgium is famous for its “finest chocolate”. While we are enjoying the sweet taste, do we ask ourselves where the chocolate comes from?

Chocolate is made of the beans of cacao trees, which has more than 5000 years of history. In the Popol Vuh, the creation story of Mayan culture, it says that our flesh is made of corn, and our blood out of cacao - a concept of relationality with the land existing together as earth beings.

This storytelling audio tour uses cacao as a vehicle for us to reconnect to the forgotten Mother Earth as Abya Yala*, to activate history into living memory, and to rethink our ways of relating to the world, as a relational living being.

*Abya Yala refers to the non-colonized Americas.