O mundo

O Mundo is a three-act happening about the relationship between cocoa, chocolate, and the dependencies between the Global North and the Global South, combining game, oracle, food, and conversation into a single collective action.

The first act is a dodgeball-style elimination game — queimada in Brazilian Portuguese, jogo do mata in European Portuguese, baleado in Bahia — played with a ball designed to look like a watermelon, on which the words "o mundo" are written. Through the body and through aim, the game enacts the global dynamics of food circulation that the research questions: as in commercial circuits, winning or losing depends on a network of bodies and positions that no one controls alone.

The second act is a performance-lecture staged around a table covered with a thin layer of chocolate, with cocoa pods arranged beneath it. The chocolate surface works as a blackboard: it is drawn on and acted upon while different narratives unfold about cocoa's journey into chocolate, letting the material itself — edible, soft, ephemeral — transform over the course of the conversation.

The third act is the Kinder Egg Oracle, in which a European Kinder Egg becomes a device for collective divination, opening a space where shared interpretation and chance stand as valid forms of knowledge.

The piece is accompanied by a publication gathering the stories, drawings, and materials produced across the three acts, extending their circulation beyond the specific moment of the happening.

To reduce the transoceanic transport of copies, the publication was printed in risograph in two parts: half in Rio de Janeiro, the other half in Barcelona — the same two cities the work brings into relation.

O Mundo was developed during a research residency at Pivô Salvador (Salvador de Bahia, Brasil), in collaboration with Hangar (Barcelona, Spain), with the support of the Institut Ramon Llull.

Photo credits Patricia Almeida