It takes three to five years after planting a fruit tree—such as an apple or cherry tree in Switzerland or a coffee tree in Brazil—before the first fruits appear. This does not even account for the quality of the soil, water, or other external conditions essential to its growth.

Four years—that is how long it took for two communities of practice, at the intersection of food, agroecology, and art, to meet, connect, and develop a project. More importantly, it is the time it took to sow, nurture, adjust, harvest, and finally savor the fruits of a collaboration that began in 2021 with the launch of our online editorial project Boca A Boca during COVID-19. This collaboration continued in 2022 with the publication of Cycle is a Cycle (by Thamyres VM and Alejandra Monteverde), a work exploring commons and forgotten ingredients, which culminated in November 2024 with the organization of Cycle is a Cycle is a Cycle in Belo Horizonte, in the mining region of Minas Gerais, Brazil.

Boca A Boca, as an online tool of dissemination, aims to rethink certain stages of contemporary cultural production labeled as "ecological" or "environmental" by adopting a slower, more sustainable pace. This rhythm has allowed us to take a step back from the research and projects we conduct in the field, as well as from the contexts from which they emerge. Aligning with the pace of the plant world or lunar cycles seems as romantic as it is revolutionary within a system that refuses to acknowledge the cyclical nature of life, which is essential to its regeneration.

For this second season of the cycle on the Commons, we invite you to explore the latest multimedia contributions through our newly designed homepage, created to facilitate reading and foster connections between theoretical contributions and concrete testimonies.

We hope that Boca A Boca can continue to provide a space for exchange among diverse sources of knowledge and practices related to what nourishes us.

Thank you to our partners Pro Helvetia South America and Swissnex for their support.

In this long-term experience, public is invited to enter the sensory and immersive universe of Ambuá's works, which invite us to reflect on alternative ways of thinking about the cycles that comprise life in the city. Taking food as a starting point, the interventions present the city as an ecosystem where the natural and the urban coexist in an indigestible way, weaving erasures and contradictions into their narrative. We are invited to reconsider what limits us, where food and land connect body and landscape. By emphasizing their own relationship to the land, Ambuá dissolves the boundaries between self and environment, proposing an understanding of landscape not as an external setting to be contemplated, but as an integral part of our own embodiment. Each element that lives here contributes to a collective choreography in which body and landscape interact in a symbolic territory. In this entanglement, the act of eating transcends the individual gesture and becomes an attitude of responsibility and shared transformation.

The show encourages its program to be experienced not as a simple route or sequence of events, but as a journey in which time folds on itself and the porous and interwoven experience suggests permanence and continuity. Cycle is a cycle is a cycle is a cycle is above all an encounter, a coming together of bodies that form an ephemeral community, a momentary collective that dissolves and recreates itself with each performance, each ritual. The cycle becomes a confluence of knowledge, people and materials that merge and coexist in the same sensitive space. The traces of time, visible in the passing of the hours, bear witness to these co-creations. They are silent reminders that the cycle is a continuous construction, sustained by the memory of each interaction, each sharing.

For Ambuá, food has been the driving force behind thinking of the landscape as something that is never exterior, because it is part of our very composition. What we eat constitutes our physiology and construct us in a tangible way. In this autobiographical work, Ambuá proposes a crossing of worlds, addressing the cultural importance of cassava while revisiting their own affecting histories. Their life is permeated by this ingredient: their mother and grandmother brought the starch landscape into the house through cheese bread, which served as a currency during their childhood; while the cassava pomace, turned into flour, became tropeiro and farofas² in their father's hands. Cassava carries within the history of the great displacements in this territory, evoking both the mitigation of hunger and the renewal of the soil, and which, on several occasions, remains the resilient sustenance when nothing else survives. By thinking about the relationship with the land, Ambuá incorporates the plow, flour and starch as part of a collective choreography. The rake that strokes the starch and flour brings with it the recognition of how cassava came to us – not as a spontaneous gift from nature, but as the fruit of hard and long-lasting work, the result of countless dialogues between native people and this food. Recognizing oneself in the landscape is, for Ambuá, also recognizing the agents who weave this complex cycle of food production. Here, no landscape disappears; the grains move in dances, sliding from one place to another, opening up space for new compositions, but invariably remaining waiting for a new orientation of the gaze.

The matter we are made of says a lot about our connection to our surroundings, to others, and to the narratives we inhabit and of which we are also agents. After all, what is the interior landscape if not the exterior landscape? In this work, Ambuá evokes the cocoon symbolism to think about the making of oneself as a collective process, comprehending the landscape outside not as something unrelated, but as an integral part of the making of one's own body. The cocoon’s skin, made from Brazilian fruits, forges this symbiosis of the body with the landscape and the impossibility of making oneself solely. There is always an encounter, an incorporation and a maturation of a new self. By assuming the fiction of the self, Ambuá affirms that every time you say "I", you are in fact someone else. Beginning this cycle with such work is to launch oneself into this metamorphosis, which involves thinking from the landscape and from within it, appropriating this environment that, in the end, is also part of us. 

Invitation: approach the cocoons, inhabit these beings through your ears and mouth. Connect the landscape outside with the landscape inside through sound. Listen closely to one of the cocoons, taste traces of the other.

This is a space of time dilation and re-chewing [remastigação]. A space of permanence, but also of exchange and community. An invitation to reflect on the hurried way in which we digest things – especially the cycle of materials in urban environments, where, between mutations and transformations, the tensions and contradictions that inhabit the very idea of the city are revealed. Incorporated into the logic of productivity, the prolonged treatment of matter erases its cyclical and mortal nature, defying its fate of degradation. Matter survives, indigestible, embodying our relationship with finitude. By bringing wood in its various forms into this space, Ambuá also evokes the memory that in the processing of each element that makes up the city, there are surplus and effects that the logic of production systematically removes from our field of vision. How, then, are we to digest this city of infinite ruptures and erasures?

Invitation: stay, inhabit this space. Experiment with liquid alchemy and taste suspended herbs. Move the boxes for your comfort. Take part in several circles of conversation.

6:30pm talk with Ambuá, Georgia Nicolau and Julia Cavazzini.

Originally from Central America, the leadtree was introduced to Brazil in the 1940s as an alternative cattle feed. Its ability to survive in degraded soils quickly facilitated its spread and distribution throughout the country. However, its ability to establish and dominate the environment has made it a threatening species. Leadtree invades a wide variety of ecosystems and has become a problem on a global scale. Ambuá observes the monocultural repetition of the urban landscape through leadtree and reflects on the impossibility of any decision about land being individual. The leadtree seeds jump over fences, ignoring the very concept of borders. Here, this material and symbolic invasion has already taken over the surroundings and the second floor. By suggesting that the seeds be eaten, Ambuá draws attention to the act of eating as a gesture of responsibility: we eat the seeds to prevent them from germinating.

Invitation: cross the crackling sea of dried leaves. Open one of the hanging pods. Eat a seed.

The act of eating is more than a biological necessity; it bears cultural, social and political meanings. Eating can be a gesture of encounter and conviviality or an act of individuation. In this work, the act of eating is rethought, becoming totally dependent on others. The scene proposed by Ambuá evokes a responsive attitude towards this everyday action, recalling it as an active and conscious gesture. Two or three-pointed wooden spoons float off the field of view, indicating what cannot be seen but can be imagined. Through distorted reflections, the work suggests the presence of an unknown person, but with whom the world is shared. This reflection makes possible not only the encounter with the gaze of this other, but also the experience of perceiving oneself while being looked at. By suggesting that strangers share an intimate object like a spoon, Ambuá proposes a radical approach, a symbolic sharing that challenges the boundaries between self and otherness.

Invitation: affect and be affected by this scene. Seek out your other.

8:30pm: performance “mouth of the world” with Ambuá.