Manipulate Festival: Coffee With Sugar?

Using thousands of coffee beans, flying candyfloss, biographical fragments, historical sources, video art and live music, ‘Coffee with Sugar?’ is a visually striking performance delving into the enduring legacies of colonialism.

Coffee and sugar are explored as symbols of Western consumption, tracing European trade and immigration relationships with Central America and their associated enduring colonial structures.

Raised between El Salvador and Germany, artist Laia Ribera Cañénguez draws on her own experience of navigating these two worlds. Educated at the German School in San Salvador, she confronts the internalized dynamics of colonial power, wrestling with two worlds, the constant suspicion of betrayal of one's "roots," the questioning of feelings of inferiority and superiority, and the open question of what to do with the knowledge of global injustice.

Winner of the Grünschnabel Award 2022

Coffee With Sugar? is part of the Traverse's £1 Ticket Project.

Presented with support from the Goethe-Institut

If you have access requirements, please contact our Sales and Welcome Team on boxoffice@traverse.co.uk or 0131 228 1404 so we can arrange reserved seating for you and discuss how else we can best support your visit.