In these conversations, we’re interested in exploring the creative processes behind people’s artworks. I’d like to start by discussing your DJ practice and the intersections between the “Safou project” and your ongoing research. During the workshop [this conversation is recorded on Nov 7, two weeks after the workshop’s conclusion], you mentioned spending some time in Chateau Rouge, the African neighborhood in Paris, and seeing the safou sellers there. Could you take us back to the initial spark that started your project? And please feel free to be digressive.

Well, don’t ask me to do that! [laughter] The funny story is that I lived in Chateau Rouge for two months in 2013, maybe 2014. I had to leave my mom’s place impromptu. It was not planned at all, something happened in my neighborhood, in the outskirts of Paris, where I grew up. I moved to my cousin’s place. At that time, my cousin shared a flat with other roommates literally in the heart of Chateau Rouge. I don’t remember the name of the street, maybe it was Rue Clément? I don’t remember. The whole neighborhood is called “La Goutte d’Or.” Down the street, there was a market. I experienced a lot of day-to-day-life activity in that place. I usually went there to buy fruit, vegetables, fish, as well as other specific food, hair cosmetics, and textiles. I guess that’s where I got re-accustomed to safous. I started to perceive them differently. When I was younger, I ate safous a couple of times, but I didn’t like them because of their taste: sour and a bit acidic.

I also don’t have a positive memory of them from my childhood.

It’s such a distinct taste! It’s a fruit, so you would probably expect a sugary taste. It has so many different flavors, Also, it tastes different when it is cooked. I remember being in Chateau Rouge every day and seeing the woman selling safous, saying “Safou, safou, safou, safou.” I became more aware of their presence and importance as food, as well as the rhythm and economy of that place. I realized that they were sold as if they were gold! There were moments when the sellers would immediately hide safous from the stalls, so that they wouldn’t get arrested by the police for selling them. When I started buying safous for myself, without my mom forcing me to eat them when I was a child, I developed another type of relationship with them. Gui, you said you don’t remember their taste well. For me, it was more a realization that, all this time, I didn’t know how to eat safous, or what to eat them with. It’s the type of fruit that you get to know, that you develop a relationship with, and you start understanding how its social function corresponds to its taste. You can have a safou as a snack, you can eat it by itself. But it’s better if you eat it with grilled plantain, which adds its smoky sweetness to the sourness of a safou. You can also fry it on a frying pan with olive oil or sesame oil, which will bring out its nut flavor. Super interesting. At that time, I would prepare colorful meals: some sweet potato, a little bit of green next to it. I would often add a safou, which fitted everywhere. More recently, I think it was around 2021, I understood the physiological function of bitter food in relation to metabolism, and I started to eat more bitter things. Safous also fitted here.

Is it about the basic pH?

I guess it’s about that. Bitter food helps with digestion. After a meal, you can eat a cola nut, which has a bitter taste.

What is a cola nut?

Actually, it’s a fruit. The nut looks a bit like a cacao nut, it has a lot of seeds, similarly to the safou. There are different cola seeds, some of them are very bitter, you can use them to refresh your mouth. You can eat one before going to bed for digestion. They have a “horrible” taste of highly concentrated bitterness, but you will feel super light in the morning.

It reminds me of a herbal tea that I started drinking recently, it’s called “czystek” in Polish. It is a popular herb in Europe.

I feel that it’s one of these herbs or flowers that now, after you have told us about it, we will start noticing it grow everywhere.

It’s funny, it’s like putting a bandage.

It’s like conducting a surgery. You cut a tree, do a surgery, and, after 2–3 months, you have full roots, so you can cut off the branch and put it in a pot or soil. This technique is widely used by people who produce safous in regions like Cameroon, Congo, and Gabon. Around 2019, I read a book by Malcom Ferdinand, a researcher and environmental engineer, who co-founded a seminar around post-coloniality. I had heard of his research around the use of pesticides in Martinique (chlordecone) in the banana fields. Even the book’s title, Decolonial Ecology, summarizes everything that I am interested in: thinking of ecology from a decolonial perspective, having a relationship with fruit, especially with the fruit types that are considered as “exotic” from the Western standpoint. I am interested in having a decolonized relationship with them, one that could question the coloniality of it all, i.e. how and where they grow, for what purpose they are grown. There are so many things to understand: that some trees are imported and change entire ecosystems, for instance. What happens to fruit trees in a global sense? How does all this impact what fruit types are available in Europe? At some point, I wondered, “Do I eat my migration when I buy this fruit?” What happens when I go to Chateau Rouge and I buy a specific fruit? Do I eat my culture? When you are displaced, when you come from a family that has immigrated, you may want to experience a familiar taste of food again. This may be connected with making sure that you don’t lose your culture, that you don’t lose yourself. Food is important in this context.

This is something that I see with the Brazilian diaspora in Vienna. My friends go to specific shops in the 5th or 6th district. I was there once with my friend, Luiza Prado, and they were selling pão de queijo. This made me think, I don’t know, I always have this image of Brazilian people eating feijoada somewhere in Europe. I thought about what it does to me, how this relates to me missing the place, missing being in Brazil. I like this expression, “eating your culture,” because I know people who do it, who eat their culture.

What do you mean by that?

If you think about the Ethiopian restaurants in Vienna, for instance, which Viennese people visit to eat Ethiopian food, which, for them, can be some form of cultural appreciation. When you place a diasporic person in this context, then this person eats their own culture. It’s interesting for me, because it’s a bit of a shift.

I see, it’s a shift because you may want to commune with others through food, or revisit your memories associated with specific food. There may be family memories or anecdotes that you would never recall otherwise, except for the moments when you eat particular food. There may be something about the shape of a fruit, or about you recalling how you loved eating this fruit as a kid, but, after you migrated, you may not want to eat it anymore, because it doesn’t make sense to do it away from home. It’s an interesting question that you need to answer for yourself. Around 2020, I started organizing the “Fruits of the Future” workshops, where we would prepare and eat foods consciously. I usually asked people to bring along their most cherished fruit, something that they would want to work with or do research about. Some participants told me that they wouldn’t eat their fruit of choice “here,” because it didn’t have the same taste as it did “there.” Another reason could be that eating this fruit is for them a ritual, or that the fruit involves a ritualistic way of eating it. And this ritual would be impossible to do “here” because, perhaps, of the climate, geographical, and cultural difference.

I asked this question also because I noticed, with several Brazilian friends of mine, particularly childhood friends who moved to Vienna or other places in Europe, that they are into eating Brazilian food in Europe, while I feel strange doing it. Sometimes I go along with it, because the vibe is “right,” but I usually feel uncomfortable doing it.

Do you know why?

I really think that it’s about the place. I find it strange to try to replicate an idea of a specific place elsewhere. I have a lot of things “here,” but the things that I associate with that particular food are not “here.” I experience something similar in using languages, which I base on relationships. I have a difficulty switching between languages. There are also other types of trauma associated with that, in the sense of wanting to speak a language “properly.” With food, it is important what situation it is eaten in, and what temperature is in and around this place. For instance, I find it strange to eat fish when it’s cold outside.

That’s very interesting. You may feel this way, because it may make no sense for your body, for your nervous system. I understand what you mean. Recently, I talked with Marissa Lôbo about quiabo or gombo (“okra”), I prepared a meal for both of us, which used okra. It’s fascinating how many layers of discrimination are socially embedded in this vegetable. It is considered ancestral to Africa and Asia, which is true, but you can find it in other locations. In Brazil, for instance, you will eat it in Bahia, it’s comida baiana. It’s a simple vegetable, you can prepare it fast, if you want. It has this slimy texture, so your palate may not be used to it. But even me, while I’m not from Brazil, I’m like, “Hmm, I feel like a lot of people will only eat that, perhaps at a specific restaurant, or in a very specific setting, with the right type of fufu to go with it, with a bowl of cassava or plantain.” Gombo is gluey and aromatic, very tasty and great for the body. It’s also something I want to implement more into my daily life: ways to eat gombo, for instance, not necessarily only as a gluey sauce, but also as a legume. It doesn’t have to be something “complicated” to prepare, something that is heavily charged because it’s ancient, family-related, or culture-specific. Each of us has specific desires or traumas connected with food, family, life experiences. Some people view such settings, like bringing Brazilian people together and eating Brazilian food, as a way to reconnect with their culture.

True, it doesn’t always have to be so culturally charged.

Yes, and then I am walking to the U-Bahn, and it’s super cold [laughter]. Contrasts!

I think this is an interesting proposition. Eve Tuck expresses it in a helpful way: colonialism is a separation between body, land, and labor. This clicked for me. You take this culturally specific food, and put it only in this space, but it cannot inhabit other settings of daily life, it has to be confined.

That’s also why I talk about relationships. How can you relate to that? How can you create a relation or a way to relate, from the other standpoint? Through this research, I understood many things about all these fruits and trees, as well as about the land from their perspective. I know this has its limits, because, with my human brain, I can only speculate or imagine things. But, based on the characteristics of the fruit, on the conditions of how it lives, grows, and circulates, how it lives with its people, I can speculate, I can imagine, I can draw pictures of many things. I can even try to understand what personality a particular fruit has. I can go deep into it without trying to personify the fruit. This is also about how the fruit relates to me, as if it could want to claim me as well. You never know. These fruits at fruit stalls see a lot of people passing by daily. I believe that they are sentient entities, perhaps even clairvoyant, since they see life passing in front of them, while people, from this arrogant human position, just dispose of them. I’m interested in exploring what types of relationship a given fruit may want to have with me. This is how I started doing these workshops, where I do a washing ritual, you can even say, of purification. In principle, it’s very simple. Before I cook or eat a fruit, I wash it, which is a conscious ritual, as this fruit may come from a super fucked-up situation, where the people, back where the fruit comes from, don’t have any agency. Or the land where it grows doesn’t have much agency. I don’t know how good or bad it is. Since many things get lost in translation, let me at least eat this fruit with clear intention. That’s how I gain understanding about how I can implement specific food, in a simple way, in my everyday life. And that’s also how, I guess subconsciously, I started using safous more. I place them on my plate together with other food, while, at the same level, they belong only to that place, these lands, these people. It’s a way of thinking of family relations or kinship relations, if you are not close with people in your culture or family, which is often the case with queer people: the question of family is not as innocent, obvious, or certain. To be able to fully exist without apologizing for anything, you may need to isolate yourself. There are different modes of ostracization: you may need to isolate yourself because you don’t feel safe or because other people push you out, as they threaten your existence. In such cases, you may need to find other places of comfort, in music, dance, food. With that, I have become more conscious of what I want. I don’t want to be afraid of peeling cassava. Cassava is not like a pomme de terre (potato), which you can peel super easily. It is a carb that looks more like the igname (or yam): it has a tough shell, like a tree’s bark. You need a big knife. Culturally, this gesture (of peeling its bark) holds a charge, such gestures come from mothers or fathers who have been doing this for years, and if you can do it yourself, then it may feel good. It feels good to do things not only for ancestral reverence l. But also it means being more conscious, for instance, about eating plant based food, that is not industrially processed, that is not charged with anxiety.

I thought of a story I would like to insert here. When we were at the Sonic Acts festival in Amsterdam, we saw a panel where two filmmakers talked about an “epistemological shift” around food. They talked about a case of the 16th- or 17th-century English discoverers who went to Central America to “discover new land” and died of starvation. They didn’t bring along enough food, but they didn’t want to eat local food, because they had an idea that if they were to eat something local, they would become “savages,” like the local people that they perceived as such. I thought of this clash between the fear and desire of consuming what is considered as “exotic.” One of the main characters of the film that they did about this case was a “flying eye,” which stood for the idea of a consuming gaze. Also, they talked about film as a form of metabolism, of metabolizing images. There is something interesting about this complicated separation concerning food: consuming food from somewhere else may be a form of hegemonic display of power over a place. In some countries, such as Brazil, being able to afford to go to a restaurant that serves French or Italian food is a sign of status and privilege.

So then, does it become a regression?

Yes, I find it interesting to think about who consumes what food and how these specific foods are confined to specific settings.

It’s super interesting, because from a socio-political and personal standpoint, it’s also about pride. The question of pride, why does it matter? Because my culture has been doomed, deemed illiterate and uncivilized, described with all of the “bad” attributes coming from the Western, colonial, imperialist standpoints. So then if I should be proud because I don’t believe in this, then how does this pride materialize? Some people regard working with fruit or food as a way of such materialization, like building a relationship with the self, self-esteem and self-recognition, with dignity and identity. For some, this amounts to pride. And it’s super important, not necessarily to nitpick it, but to understand that for each of us pride takes on different forms, different twists and turns, different areas of exploration, different ways to unveil itself and to grow. Some people may be like, “Oh, I want that plant from my village, and I’m going to grow many plants of that kind.” Or: “This food has a symbolic charge to me, because my sister, or whoever that I loved, used to cook it for me, and she was the person who accepted me for who I am.” Or: “Cooking is my base, I cannot find this one specific taste in the local food here, so I am going to make it.” My pride is being able to make the food, being able to taste it, and being able to invite friends to share that moment with. Pride is also about the attachment to oneself and to others. Both pride and joy can stem from a realization that you have knowledge that is a capital that some choose to capitalize on, while some don’t.

Pride can also be about resistance.

Yes, because you resist some deathly beliefs, beliefs that kill your soul, you know? When you have people who say, I am going to quote Trump, “shithole countries”! Such words affect the psyche on a social, political, and psychological level, when you’re a displaced queer trans kid or adult. Or when you are a person of color living in a very white society. When I say “white,” it’s not only about white people being a norm there, but it’s also about the specific mentality, according to which only some things are right, correct. This is what I mean when I talk about “coloniality” in a general sense. When you live surrounded by whiteness, grasping and digesting whiteness, with all of its deathly power over your soul, the only way to resist is to make sure that you sustain the smallest things that bring you pride and joy. In my case, it’s working with the safou, understanding it as a collaborative and relational effort, detaching myself from being the center, trying to understand the standpoint of the fruit, to create conversations with it. All this has become to me also about pride. This is also how I started talking about my queerness, by using the virtues of that fruit and by being in conversation with it. That’s also “Safou Lover,” a song that started as a cover of “Choosey Lover,” a song by The Isley Brothers, which was later covered by Aaliyah. It’s a slow jam. There’s this line: “Choosey lover / I’m so glad I found you.” It’s super simple. I thought that this could be about a “safou lover,” so I changed the lyrics a bit. Around the same time, I started DJ’ing and I would play a lot of slow jams. I thought, let me mix up some slow jams that could accompany this erotic act of eating fruit.

You spoke about how music became part of your practice. You spoke about your strategies of relating yourself to the safou. You also spoke about creating the Nyum Supernova persona, which we see in your videos; I had a feeling that this character was also present in your show at Kunstraum Niederösterreich. There are explicit references to the safou in the sculptures and soft pieces that you showed us during the workshop. You create spaces that are sensorial, that involve smell and tactility. At the same time, you imbue everything with music. I wonder about the relationship between these elements, how you navigate all these connections in your mind.

It makes me joyous to hear you say that, because when I was in the realm of “Safou Lover,” I started writing a text around immigration that incorporated the memories of my mom’s, how she migrated to France. The text was also a mix of fiction and fantasy. I wrote about a kid named Ngomboa, who ate a safou seed, and, in their belly, two seeds came out, like twin seeds. The entire story is said from the standpoint of these two seeds, whose voice also narrates the character’s intuition. When you said about consuming something to help you continue walking, I thought wow, in the story that I wrote, I say that what I eat is my intuition. What I eat makes me more conscious of who I am. It helps me to gain understanding of where I can go, where “we” as humans go, and how we can consider that with more distance. I don’t know how I came up with the word “intuition,” maybe because it is auto/biographic. My intuition tells me a lot of things, and when I don’t listen, then I try writing around that because I want to hold myself more accountable. There’s also that. Also, these days, I try to understand what this incorporation or this nourishment does to me. These days, I try to be more aware of my gut health, and I feel, more than ever before, this intuitive power, sensitivity, and empathy. I speak for myself: when you detoxify your gut, you let in more space for yourself, for your sensitivity. It may not be so good because you have less tolerance for a lot of things, you feel more, you have more sensitivity. When I walk, I feel how my muscles walk along with me. I don’t have all this weight in my stomach, like I used to. When you eat with more consciousness, you think of food sometimes the whole day. You start integrating the concept of the virtue of what you eat. I don’t mean to say that food literally heals, but it does bring you into a different realm. I think that being in this very organized society, urban life, everything clashes, all of these contradictions clash. They generate steadiness as well, out of this cohabitation. When I was in Guadeloupe, I was close to a river for a month. I never felt this good in my body. I was surrounded by trees, water, and minerals from the rocks, and not by buildings with a lot of glass surfaces and not by a lot of people that you can compare yourself to. I had less dysphoria than ever, because I didn’t see my body so much. I would hear the water flow. I basked naked, I was naked all the time. And it’s not that I have changed, but I found myself in my natural habitat. So now I’m striving for steadiness. I don’t mind having a croissant here and there, but I’m trying to maintain health to the point that I can eat intuitively. I’m overstimulated by all the lights, glass, people, the energies of their stares, their hostility. This also has good parts, as you get to be imaginative because of everything that you see every day. Also, being on a bike, I meet people in a different way. Sometimes, I see someone with a cute hairstyle. Sometimes there is camaraderie between people on bikes, or between people in cars and bikers. You get to see life from a different standpoint.

We should slowly come to an end. It’s amazing, thank you. I’m grateful, because we’ve talked a lot about things that we didn’t talk about before.