“Sugar and Spice and All Things Nice” is a spatial installation that explores the cultural value of food in the Western world, taking the Netherlands and its culinary tradition as a case study. It uncovers the colonial and extractive histories embedded in food, tracing how their legacies still underpin our contemporary economic reality.
The historical context under examination is the so-called Dutch Golden Age (17th century), during which the Low Countries became the primary trading power in spices and cane sugar, sourcing from Southeast Asia, Brazil, and Suriname. This trade in precious raw ingredients — built on the coerced labour of plantation extraction — laid the groundwork for what is believed to be the world's first multinational corporation: the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and, subsequently, the Chartered West India Company (WIC).
The installation also questions how national identity informs and shapes our food system, and how it is, in turn, shaped by it. Which are the institutional spaces where this national memory is negotiated?
This question is given material form through a series of printed textile surfaces — tea towels, napkins, and a tablecloth — each representing a distinct phase of the food cycle and its social role: production, consumption, and cultural transmission.
Placed at the centre of the table sits a replica of the Mauritshuis palace, modelled in speculaas, a shortcrust cookie traditionally shaped with carved wooden moulds and flavored with spices originating from the eastern Indonesian archipelago of the Moluccas. This museum, standing in the very center of The Hague and right beside the dutch parliament, holds one of the most celebrated collections of Dutch Golden Age paintings: its edible likeness renders visible the proximity between dutch national heritage and the extractive economies that financed it.
Then as now, what we consume and place on our plate reflects the fundamental ways in which the identity of a territory is constructed — and the forces that sustain it. All things nice leave a residue behind.