A Reflective Cup of Coffee is a video essay re-telling coffee’s colonial history from a first person point-of-view, as told by Coffee, the Goddess of wakefulness, in an effort to re-centre the more-than-human agent in this story. It was shown in November 2024 in the Dutch National Archive, where one can read about the Dutch colonial coffee trade, during the Archival Frictions exhibition aimed at questioning the colonial gaze that underpins the archive's material.
This video essay is informed by my own research in the National Archive. One of the world's most successful plantations, coffee gets transported from the tropical highlands to the higher latitudes at great environmental cost only to be soaked in water and then discarded. Its growth relies largely on precarious workers in the Global South. From its sacred origin – coffee was first used by Yemenite Sufis as an aid for concentration during religious worship – it became synonymous with productivity, caffeine becoming the daily fuel for the workers of modern businesses.
However, coffee has been and still is a powerful social bond. In early modern Europe, coffee houses were rare spaces where people across different social classes could meet and discuss politics, even becoming outlawed in places where they threatened institutional power. Many cultures around the world, especially those who grow coffee, have developed their own socially focused rituals around it.
A Reflective Cup of Coffee, as well as its sister project Reflective Coffee Corner, aim to reclaim coffee drinking as an opportunity to gather around and share stories, sparking critical conversations about our relationship with it.