Metabolizing yerba mate perspectives. A fieldwork practice towards mending & cultivating soil belongings

Abstract

This Master's thesis circles around the Swiss-Argentine heritage and impact of Yerba Mate production and its global logistics. The author scrutinises the Swiss popular drink of El Tony mate and her own identity as an Argentinian-Italian immigrant in Switzerland, as both subjects and offsprings of a globalization campaign. By revising and co-gathering both institutional and personal archives (that of the ETH Zurich Agronomist Studies and the environmental records of her father Juan Carlos Chebez) Camila puts into evidence the territorial complexities of a shared history of colonialism and resource extraction, implicated within the act of consuming the plant. When critically engaging with the larger bodies of productionist-subjected soils that have become impoverished, what medicinal knowledge can this plant’s leaves and photographic archives brew in combination? Metabolizing Yerba Mate perspectives, plants an initial image that hopes to imagine and seed canopies under which to face together the looming signs of troubling-times ahead.