2014
Participatory performance
Live coffee plant, Colombian literature, and podium by Chicago artist Jim Duignan

The piece was a part of the inaugural Green Art + Social Practice Fair at Columbia College Chicago.

Participants were invited to read to a young coffee plant from a selection of Colombian novels, short stories, and poems in both Spanish and English. As readers encouraged the plant’s growth and reconnected it with its origins, they also shared important cultural contributions from a country whose narrative in the U.S. usually emphasizes coffee and cocaine. Though many of the texts that were read are under-appreciated in the English-speaking world (some long out of print), I also included works by Gabriel García Márquez, who had passed away just days before the GASP! Fair.

Colombian coffee was, of course, provided.

(Photos by Emily Madigan)