peperduur

as expensive as black pepper in Dutch

Beyond (design) Frontiers exhibition
Prague(CZ)
Dec 2024 - Feb 2025

Design exhibition, Gouda Festival 2024
Gouda (NL)
Oct 2024 - Jan 2025

DDW + DAE 2024
Eindhoven (NL)
Oct 2024

Nominated for Social Design Talent Award by Eindhoven municipality
Eindhoven (NL)
Jul 2024

Peperduur, MA Social Design at Design Academy Eindhoven, explores the colonial past and postcolonial capitalist realities of the international black pepper trade by critically fabulating an alternative history that runs tangentially to documented history.

Mapping out the timeline of black pepper international trade and it’s colonial histories

Secondary research along with multi-sited ethnographic research in and around Shimoga, India and Eindhoven, Netherlands are the primary methods for the research produced in this project.

Following the ethnographic research, the project then dives into critical fabulation and speculative fabulation as a methodology for design.

This design methodology emerged from the secondary and primary research into the history of international spice trade, which brought up many instances of overlooked experiences of the marginalised people during the colonial ages. It was through Sadiya Hartman’s critical fabulation in writing and Daniella Rosner’s adaptation of the same in design, that emerged naturally out of my research. 
workshopping alternating realities

Through an installation of designed artefacts and historical excerpts relating the impacts of this ubiquitous spice on farmers and consumers in India and the Netherlands, Peperduur reflects on the social and economic relationship with black pepper over the centuries, revealing the
political factors that shape how everyday food commodities come to be taken for granted.

How inevitable is today’s socio-economic state of labour-intensive agro-commodities then
really?

Narrative video







installation and designed object - stainless steel - 500mm x 500mm total size










Read the thesis here