In a moment where food and gastronomic aesthetics dominate visual culture, Paola’s artistic intervention stands apart by reinterpreting food not as a prop but through an ethnographic and historical lens. Her work goes beyond the surface of a culinary image, diving into the symbolic and cultural weight that the act of eating carries within society. Through carefully crafted visual narratives, Paola reclaims ‘eating’ as a system of communication, a signifier of identity, belonging, and memory. Paola A. Sanchez is a Colombian visual artist living in London, who critically engages with food imagery and eating rituals as both a cultural object and as an element to explore complex issues of identity, power, and belonging. Paola’s work bridges the gap between artistic expression and research.

A New Semiotic Approach

The concept of belonging is the starting point for her recent art research-led publication The Spectacular Food, an ongoing project based on the study of discourses and practices within the food universe, as well as the processes of construction and expression of sociocultural identity, its semiotics.

Paola’s art exposes the hidden narratives embedded in food imagery. By employing visual correlations and repetitive patterns, she creates compositions that challenge conventional interpretations of food, consumption, and eating. Each visual is not simply an aesthetic configuration but a complex text that reveals the socio-political frameworks of a particular historical moment.

How does a simple dish—such as a hot dog or pizza—become a political actor within her artwork? By deconstructing its representations across various cultural contexts, Paola exposes how dishes, recipes, rituals, and manners have been central to colonial economies, migration patterns, and narratives of power. Food, in her hands, becomes both sustenance and a mirror reflecting the human condition, acting as a communication tool.

Navigating Between Latitudes

Working between two cultural realities, Paola embodies the fluidity of transnational identity. Her personal experience of navigating distinct sociopolitical environments informs her practice, allowing her to approach food imagery with a dual perspective. This position enhances the critical depth of her work, where the local and the global, the personal and the collective, merge into intricate visual dialogues.

In her research-driven methodology, she assembles images from a variety of sources, including news, archives, and ready-made supermarket food, categorizing them to create new visual arrangements. These narratives unveil messages through chains of signifiers, interconnecting topics and knowledge that question how collective memory shapes contemporary cultural heritage.

Her art-making process, grounded in rigorous research, functions as an alternative form of knowledge production. It bridges academic inquiry and artistic expression, making visible the often-ignored legacies of colonization, migration, and economic exploitation inherent in food systems.

The Visual Politics of Belonging

One of Paola’s central themes is the politics of belonging. Her compositions reveal how food rituals and representations become acts of inclusion or exclusion, markers of class, race, cultural hierarchy and soft power. She exposes the constructed nature of culinary traditions and their role in defining communal identities. She invites viewers to reflect on how the commodification of certain foods reflects broader patterns of economy and culture.

As food embodies collective awareness, the narrative also leaves space for viewers to interpret the content based on their own context and previous knowledge. The result is the rise of multiple intertwined stories, confronting different social perspectives of food.

A Critical Reflection on Memory and Identity

Paola’s work challenges the viewer to reconsider their relationship with food beyond consumption: What does it mean to inherit a culinary tradition? How does collective memory inform the way we understand ourselves through our eating rituals? And whose histories are told in the process? Paola’s artistic practice is a necessary counterpoint to the commodification of food in contemporary visual culture. Her explorations of eating as a signifier of identity and belonging remind us that what we eat, how we eat, and how we represent food are deeply political acts.