Melih Aydemir, Easy Vegan Vanilla Cake (The Politics of Cake), 2021, Color Video, sound, 14:03Research board.
Click here to watch snippet of the video [04:07]
Melih Aydemir’s Easy Vegan Vanilla Cake (The Politics of Cake) video borrows its style from homemade cake recipe videos on YouTube. While giving a manipulated version of a vegan cake recipe, the video separates each ingredient and dives into the history and politics behind making a cake. The information collected from the internet on topics like sugar plantations, the history of vanilla in Europe, metaphors of the cake, and fair division is given throughout the video in between steps of the recipe together with the artist’s personal notes. This crossover suggests a similar experience to browsing the web, sliding through the overflowing information. As an important factor changing the course of colonialism, the food nobody needs but everyone craves, sugar, becomes the most important ingredient for the cake, and it turns into a metaphor for the layers of systematic racism, economical division problem and love.
This video is produced after the invitation of Tehran/London based The II Platform and Fatemeh Kazemi under project ‘‘From Bread to Cake’’ curated by Fatemeh Kazemi.
A page from the Easy Vegan Vanilla Cak recipe.
