Abstract
Since 2019, the Barcelona/Miami based multidisciplinary artist Antoni Miralda and I have been collaborating on a project aiming to illuminate the aesthetics and politics of one of the most omnipresent, but least understood “worldly goods,” the humble Maggi bouillon cube. Originating in a food-centered performance event that Miralda held in Miami’s Little Haiti, the project aims to tell the story of Maggi’s seasoning’s rise to global prominence, illuminate its various local uses, explore bodies of knowledge about Maggi cubes – both as a product and brand but also as a cultural icon: all documented in a rich visual archive including product packaging, posters featuring the cubes, historical advertisements and war time propaganda, billboards in Africa displaying gendered images, cookbooks that include Maggi cubes as an ingredient in their recipes, Cubist art incorporating the Maggi cube, and photographic work that Miralda created for the project, as a reinterpretation of the genre of still life incorporating a Maggi cube as a part of the composition.
Bio
Stephan Palmié is Edna and Norman Freehling Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Das Exil der Götter: Geschichte und Vorstellungswelt einer afrokubanischen Religion (1991), Wizards and Scientists: Explorations in Afro-Cuban Modernity and Tradition (2002), The Cooking of History: How Not to Study Afro-Cuban Religion (2013), and Thinking with Ngangas: What Afro-Cuban Ritual Can Tell Us about Scientific Praxis – and vice versa (2023) as well as the editor of several volumes on Caribbean and Afro-Atlantic anthropology and history.