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The Mies van der Rohe Foundation hosts the presentation of Maggi Galaxy
Miralda and Stephan Palmié explore the global history of the Maggi broth cube in a project between art, anthropology and cultural memory.
The Fundació Mies van der Rohe presents the art and anthropology book Maggi Galaxy , a work by artist Miralda and anthropologist Stephan Palmié that investigates the global trajectory, cultural imaginaries and symbolic charge of the Maggi soup cube. Starting from a seemingly insignificant everyday object, the project builds a vast visual archive made up of packaging, advertising posters, cookbooks, propaganda, artistic works and photographs by Miralda.
The set proposes a reflection on food, consumption and globalization, as well as on the way in which domestic objects can condense historical and cultural stories of global scope.
The presentation of the book is accompanied by the artistic intervention Mies Maggi , which reinterprets an imagined episode set in the context of the 1929 Barcelona International Exhibition. In that setting, the German Pavilion in Barcelona—designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich—hosted the official reception presided over by Kings Alfonso XIII and Victoria Eugenia, along with German authorities.
A few meters away, the artistic fiction places a "Maggi Pavilion", lit by lamps in the shape of cubes of concentrated broth, which evoke the will of the brand founded by Julius Maggi to integrate into industrial modernity and expand globally in the field of domestic cooking.
The project plays with the idea of reflections, transparencies and sensory perceptions. It evokes how the inscription “Maggi free tastings” could have been reflected in the water of the Mies pavilion, generating an almost spectral image, while the aroma of the broth crossed the exhibition space until it permeated the atmosphere of the neighboring pavilion.
Between the geometric rigor of modern architecture and the extraordinary banality of a food object, Mies Maggi proposes an unexpected dialogue: an imaginary encounter between form and taste, between material culture and sensory experience, which rethinks the way we read the history of modernity through its most everyday objects.
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