*Spanish Pavilion, 18 Venice Architecture Biennale 2023

We usually understand digestion to be process in which our digestive system transforms food into substances that our bodies can assimilate. But this is just a negligible part of all of the digestive processes in which we participate and in which we are entangled. While our stomachs and intestines extract nutrients, many other bodies, in many other places, and at many other times, are incessantly digesting in many different ways, comprising a colossal waste-processing ecosystem which paradoxically tends to remain invisible, whether in its physical, symbolic or normative dimension.

Defecation may seem to put an end to the process of digestion. However, this action is nothing more than a moment in which our digestive apparatuses get connected to a colossal tentacular network where our bodies expand their cyborg condition and where the wastes undertake an endless journey, crossing a multiple infrastructural geography that never ceases to digest. In Madrid, the sanitation system encompasses 15,317 km of pipes, 5,791 kilometers of sewers, 34 water mains, 35 storm water ponds and 8 waste water treatment stations, all conforming a sort of invisible biotechnological layer disseminated over strategic landscapes of incommensurable inertia and dynamics…

One may get the impression that when one throws leftovers into the rubbish, the problem of the waste disappears with it. But behind this everyday gesture, food waste continues to incessantly transform rubbish into landscapes, new food for new stomachs, new products like biogas, compost, chemical fertilizers, animal feeds, drugs, cosmetics, oils, gelatines, skin for sausages, other wastes such as leached or as digestate, often times highly toxic (for some bodies). On this journey, waste is valued, economized, commodified, monetized, sold, incinerated, fetichized…

And although generally, we are barely aware of its existence and assume that it has no bearing on our every-day life, the truth is that it radically alters our habitat and greatly impacts the Earth’s architecture. Importantly, as the FAO indicates in its report "Food Waste Footprint: Impacts On Natural Resources", published in 2013, if world food waste were considered as a country, it would be the third largest emitter of CO2 into the atmosphere, behind the United States and China, with an average of 3.3 million tons of co2 released yearly. More than a country, this process of processes, this digestion of digestions is, in reality, a creature. A creature that digests (us): Ca.Ca.

Ca.Ca. is there, although we don’t see it. It is monstrous and ordinary, huge and tiny. It is a body of bodies made up of a labyrinth of organisms, architectures, artefacts, infrastructures, territories, landscapes, geologies, technologies, black boxes, waste, scrap metal, biota, microbiota, stomachs, intestines, microplastics, gases, fossils, sludge, organic and in-organic processed material, transactions, listings, regulations, valuations, beliefs, myths, ghosts… It is an unfathomable choreography because it is rolled out in a process of interdependent socio-technical processes. It has many agencies and scales, from the macro to micro scale, from the planetary to a breadcrumb scale, from a cosmic to a molecular scale. It works in polytemporal cycles that link age-old situations to ordinary paces, profound times to the near futures, waste dynamics to colonial processes. It inhabits the soil under our feet, in our guts, in networks with biotechnological tentacles.

We live both inside and outside Ca.Ca.. It cuts through us. It’s a metabolic, dynamic entity whose matter is in constant metamorphosis, decomposition and re-composition, processed and transmuted. It is a digestion of digestions incessantly (ex)changing, relating, and (dis)assembling with others. It acts and feels. It transforms each scrap into a fact, the unfruitful into fertile, the urgent into indifferent. And the other way around. It is exuberant and fecund, repugnant and dangerous. It regulates our health, our comfort, the framework in which we co-exist, our economy, our fragility. It resists to be represented and, at the same time, it is a theatre, a fetish and an anthropogenic archive. It is mysterious but real, imaginary but material, invisible but omnipresent. It is a heterogenous form of intelligence that surpasses all human exceptionalism. Ca.Ca. is a cannibal carnival. 

It is a carnival because Ca.Ca.. is a synchronic choreography of flows and bodies in constant action. And it is cannibal because, in Ca.Ca. all bodies digest one another. In Ca.Ca., in fact, there is no waste. There are only digestions.

This process began chasing after the spaces of digestion in Madrid and ran into an exceptional creature that, over the course of more than half a year, has defied our ability to analyse, the ways we relate to one another and our ethical responsibility. The more we studied it, the less we understood it. It is true that its mutant condition has not made it easy for us. But there was something else. We have learned that Ca.Ca. is not something that is “out there”, waiting to be discovered. The truth is that it also lives within us. We belong to its bodies. It affects us. It turns us into (its) infrastructure. It makes us participate in all of the ecological and digestive processes that take place at once and parallel to one another, at a territorial and microbial scale. And, while we continue to digest, we no longer have any doubts: we are Ca.Ca.

Ca.Ca. is a research project developed by elii + María Jerez at the invitation of Eduardo Castillo and Manuel Ocaña, curators of the Spanish Pavilion at the 18th Venice Biennale of Architecture (2023). This research on food waste in Madrid that takes the form of a film, two cosmograms and a report that were presented during the biennial.

*Spanish Pavilion, 18 Venice Architecture Biennale 2023

Foodscapes, Episode 1: Digestion

1. Cyborg condition. Digestive apparatuses that connect with a colossal tentacular network expanding their bodies in a multiple infrastructural geography that never ceases to digest.

A digestion of digestions.

2. Terraforming waste. Digestion processes that have a significant impact on the Earth's environmental architecture. Digestion of digestions where the planet digests but also digests itself and us.

A planet that (digests) itself.

3. Other intelligences. Set of concatenated infrastructures and digestive processes that become a strange entity, an excessive being endowed with a singular intelligence that defies human exceptionalism.

A metabolic creature.

4. Economy of representation. Changing network that, while mobilizing millions of tons of garbage, multiplies its representations to, paradoxically, avoid being represented and amplify its phantasmatic condition.

A representation of representations.

5. Bastard Arcimboldo. Multiplicity of bodies linked at different spatial and temporal scales as an anthropogenic archive.

A body of interdependent bodies, multiple agencies and plural ontologies. 

6. Infrastructural ecology. Infrastructures of industrial waste management, production, marketing and services, social action, processing and digestion, excretion, extraction, processing, discharge and emission, sanitary waste, political action and influence, governance, information and knowledge, production and sustaining of imaginaries, microorganisms, logistics and distribution, cultural and design, financial, digital...

An infrastructure of infrastructures.

7. Environmental injustice. Unequally distributed ecological impacts and responsibilities at a planetary scale. 

A situated body.

8. Synchronous choreography. Flows of constant interaction in which all bodies digest each other. There is no waste. Only digestions.

A cannibal carnival

9. We are Ca.Ca.. Infrastructural foodwaste ecology that lives (in) us. 

We are (its) infrastructure. 

• Organizers: 
• Government of Spain through the Directorate General of Urban Agenda and Architecture of the Ministry of Transport, Mobility and Urban Agenda (MITMA), Acción Cultural Española (AC/E) and the Spanish Agency of International Cooperation for Development (AECID).
•  
• Curators:
• Eduardo Castillo–Vinuesa y Manuel Ocaña.

• Photographs of the Pavilion:
• Pedro Pegenaute
• https://www.pedropegenaute.es/
•  
• Credits Digestion - Ca.Ca. (Cannibal Carnival):

• Direction and concept:
• María Jerez & elii [architecture office]
• Uriel Fogué, Eva Gil, Carlos Palacios, Gemma Barricarte, Teresa Martínez

• Production management:
• Elisa Celda

• Director of photography and camera operator:
• Pablo Paloma

• Editor and sound editor:
• Oscar Vincentelli

• Sound engineer:
• Isabella Cecilia Bello

• Cast:
• Louana Gentner, Sherwin Goddard, Beatriz Molina, Elisa Celda, Uriel Fogué, Gemma Barricarte, Teresa Martínez 

• Locations:
• Parque Tecnológico de Valdemingómez, EDAR La Gavia (Canal Isabel II - Comunidad de Madrid), Casquería Juanito, Granja DeYerba, Casquería Juanito, Pescadería El Cantábrico, Cementerio Sacramental de Santa María, Studio Pegaso, Private Home

• Stock images:
• iStock.com/FinkAvenue
• iStock.com/FineVideo

• Thanks to:
• Parque Tecnológico de Valdemingómez, Canal Isabel II - Comunidad de Madrid, Milagros Benito. Banco de Alimentos de Madrid, José Luis Cifuentes & Beatriz Molina - Parque Tecnológico de Valdemingómez, Raquel Díaz – Espigoladors, Diego Morera – Arquitecto e investigador, Jacinto Navlet & Tomasz Michalczyk - Espacio Vecinal de Arganzuela - EVA, Juan Carlos Ortiz - Departamento de Fauna y Biodiversidad – Ayuntamiento de Madrid, Elena de la Paz - Departamento de Depuración - Área de gobierno de Medio Ambiente y Movilidad – Ayuntamiento de Madrid, Roberto Pérez, Claudia Gutiérrez & Pablo Pantoja - Saria Bio-Industries España, Rosa Pérez - Asociación Vecinal PAU Ensanche de Vallecas, Beatriz Sánchez - SEO Birdlife, Luis Tejero - S.G. de Energía y Cambio Climático – Ayuntamiento de Madrid, Alberto Vizcaíno – Investigador y escritor

• Special thanks to:
• Odile Atthalin, María Buey, Gerardo Fernández, Fernando García Dory, Maral Kekejian, Enrique Pastor, Esteban Perles, Juan Suárez, Juan Gómez-Catalán, Sara Gallego, Fernando Torres
•  
• + info:
• https://foodscapes.es
• https://foodscapes.es/films/?film:digestion