Our project shines light on the baby milk sector, particularly Nestlé as a big multinational company, and provides a counter-narrative to Nestlé’s virtual museum, installed in the virtual headquarter in Vevey, Switzerland (Nestlé 2024: Nest Virtual Tour). We do this by analyzing the accounts of mothers taking care of their babies in areas where clean water is not a matter of course (De Alba 2020; Pachego Vega 2019), the memories of our grandmothers in Switzerland and Belgium,  the perspective of a Nestlé employee on the internal structures of the company, and the experiences of an activist fighting for the health of infants and standing against big companies and their profit endeavours (Baby Milk Action UK 2015; Johnson and Duckett 2020).  Not only the city can be an archive, but also planetary urbanization processes can be looked at as archives and help to uncover different stories. They can be found, for example, in rural villages in Kenya, the living room of a Swiss mother, in the courtroom of the hearings brought forward by action groups and in the offices of Nestlé.  

To be able to read Nestlé’s archive “against the grain”, we agree with Stoler’s argument that it is crucial to first “read along the archival grain” (ibid.: 100). Therefore, at the beginning of our project, we attentively investigated Nestlé’s own perspective on their history through their virtual museum. The Nestlé virtual museum talks a lot about women, but doesn't let any women's voices do the talking. Secondly, during the visit, one gets a sense of manipulation because of the stereotypical images of women in domestic roles, but also, and somewhat paradoxically, of feminist discourse, all to promote Nestlé and its products.

COUNTER - INSTALLATION

Our exhibition took the form of a cardboard kitchen decorated with empty tins on which we put Nestlé product labels. Around the cardboard kitchen, we exposed the silhouettes of five women. We gave them a story and a voice. Nestlé's advertising campaigns often tend to assign women to the domestic space and to the kitchen in particular, but without giving them a voice. In our exhibition, fictional women tell five fictional stories, a combination of personal accounts and research into scientific literature. The final stage of our installation was to lend our voices to these five fictional women, so that they could tell their hitherto silenced stories to interested listeners.