HELVETIA and the journey of a cocoa bean
What is Swiss chocolate? Although an emblematic industry and symbol for Switzerland, the key ingredient in the chocolate blend is cocoa, a colonial product, which is impossible to grow under Swiss climatic conditions. It has always been imported, most often from Ghana or Côte d’Ivoire, the two biggest cocoa producing countries.
Following a neocolonial and extractivist logic, cocoa production not only leads to considerable environmental impacts such as deforestation and biodiversity loss, but also reinforces inequalities along the value chain leading to social implications: incomes below the poverty line, unsafe working conditions, and child labour to name just a few. The art-science collaboration Helvetia and the Journey of a Cocoa Bean seeks to counteract the invisibility — and even the erasure — of the spatiotemporal context of cocoa in the marketing of Swiss chocolate.
Who are the people who produce the cocoa for Swiss chocolate, what are their stories and what do they want to communicate to consumers? To approach these questions, researcher Braida Thom interviewed ninety-two cocoa producers from the region of Soubré in Côte d’Ivoire. Artist Marie van Berchem and researchers Kenza Benabderrazik and Braida Thom then created a traveling exhibition for corner shops to convey the messages of the farmers to Swiss chocolate consumers.
