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In this piece, Marta Moya, one of its founders, invites us to see from the gut, leads us through a delicate choreography between art, food and everyday life, and reveals the power of activating the collective through gastronomy: the true universal language.
Foundational stories can also be written through gathering, connection and shared life. Not everything began with a spear. Sometimes the origin lies in a basket, an open bag, a gesture of care. That is what Ursula K. Le Guin imagined in her 1986 theory, The Carrier Bag.
And what would it mean to eat that theory for dinner? How would one design the menu, the lighting, the sound or the pairing that best embodies this work?
At Fondo, we devote ourselves to researching artistic practices and translating them into the language of gastronomy. Dishes, wines and everything around them become vehicles for ideas, meaning and narrative. We not only see gastronomic practice as a valid artistic form, but also believe deeply in its transformative power.
Our work is one of translation: we take the messages of contemporary art and turn them into edible experiences. This research — which we understand as a form of radical curiosity — joins a collective exercise of imagination, and begins with the discourse of contemporary art.
Both gastronomy and art seek to provoke a bodily experience, a tangible reaction. They do not necessarily respond to logic or reason: they are forms of representation. Representations of stories, truths and lies, inheritances, entire peoples or individual homes. They help us understand the history of a given artist, or the theory of a certain writer.
They invite us to reflect on why in Spain we have gazpacho, whose main ingredient was first brought from the American continent, then considered poisonous, now regarded as a national source of pride and, more recently, turned into a viral Loewe image. A product as everyday as the tomato, something that may go unnoticed, is crossed by a tangle of cultural adaptations, scientific advances, changes in landscape and structures; it also speaks to us of colonialism and politics, of memes and economics…
A tomato speaks to us about our past history, about our relationship with others, with the world and with the planet. And if we look carefully, it may also offer clues about the future.
For us, art and gastronomy are tied together by many threads, but above all by their capacity to activate the collective, the shared. We all live inside a body. The simple act of perceiving that connects us all, anchoring us to our human, animal, material reality.
In this context, research means asking questions through curiosity and sensitivity. It is the impulse that moves artists, cooks, designers and creators of all kinds.
When we engage with art — whether in a text, in a gallery or in any other format — we open up spaces for empathy and understanding. We believe those spaces are best accessed through the stomach. We feel that food is a language shared by all, a kind of Esperanto.
We train ourselves to see through other eyes, through other guts. And that, we believe, has transformative power.
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