Food and Scarcity: Ediciones Vigía's Aesthetics of Abjection (1999-2010)

Abstract: This article explores the representation of food and scarcity in the recent publications of Ediciones Vigía, an award-winning press from Matanzas, Cuba that uses discarded materials to craft beautiful and highly collectible book-objects. Critics often praise the beauty of Vigía publications, their creative use of "humble" materials, and their resistance to, on the one hand, the state's Soviet-inspired cultural policies and, on the other, the commodity fetishism of late capitalism. What is often overlooked in this critical recognition is the importance of abjection for the artistic project of Vigía and its long-time director Rolando Estévez Jordán (1953-2023). Adopting a gastrocritical lens, I focus on four cookbooks published between 1999 and 2007, as well as Liuvan Herrera Carpio's story collection Discurso del hambre mientras se marchitan dos ciudades (2009) and René Coyra's poetry chapbook La gran depresión (2010). I ultimately interpret Ediciones Vigía as a desiring-machine, one that takes in and transforms the material residues of Cuban life to contrasting ends: while this process at times yields an embellishment that glosses over the abjection of materials and Cuban material circumstances as such, at others it crafts a dissident aesthetics that takes abjection to its very center.