In The Avocado Toast, Linda Schilling Cuellar presents research into how human invention, neoliberal economic legislation, a wellness food trend, and patents taken out on nature collapsed the Petorca river landscape in Chile's Central Valley, erasing world-making livelihoods. 

Accountability stretches deep into the past when examining how the water crisis was enabled, and begs the question: can the idea of progress be challenged in favour of what Anna Tsing describes as ‘polyphonic assemblages’, a multi-species transformative encounter that leads to a collaboration rather than exploitation? 

By examining an expanded list of ingredients in the avocado toast recipe, this episode explores how our appetites and ingenuity push ecosystems to their limit and enact expulsions elsewhere. If the places we ‘live from’ are not the ones we ‘live at’, can we enact solidarity, shifting our patterns of consumption in order to truly live together with all non-human entities in this world? 

Linda Schilling Cuellar is an architect and urban designer from Chile. Her practice focuses on questions related to methodological approaches to the discipline of architecture, exploring narrative tools along with questions of scale and accountability in the context of extractive economies. A William Kinne Fellow, she is currently researching for the short film, Scheherazade’s Tale: The Many Lives of Aqaba, Jordan, which develops an analysis of terraforming processes to understand the ecological implications of the new urban orders generated by financial speculation. Currently, Schilling Cuellar teaches at Universidad Andrés Bello and Universidad De Las Américas in Chile, for undergraduate urban design studios.