The Flowers of the Coffee Field

The initiative

Sustainable coffee is a specialty product that is grown in rural communities in the central region of the world, where a delicate combination of factors allows it to be produced. Due to migratory processes, at present it is women who lead its cultivation. Groups of producers work in small organizations, cooperatives and family farms, striving to present competitive products in current markets, which also represent and strengthen their cultural identity.

The Flowers of the Coffee Field initiative is an artistic project presented by Colectivo Rokunin that combines distinctive elements of the coffee growing areas in the world. The protagonists are the women coffee producers and the flowers that grow in and around their sustainable coffee plantations. The project seeks to create a bridge between producers and consumers, presenting the faces and stories of the former, and allowing to deepen and reinterpret the sensory experience of enjoying coffee for the latter. This work also seeks to create awareness of the biocultural importance around coffee.

The Flowers of the Coffee Field encompasses an editorial and a digital project that are parallel and built in synchrony and feed of each other's content and actions.

The book

The initiative will generate a book and a digital platform that will include:

Photographic portraits of women coffee producers wearing floral crowns elaborated with local flowers and plants of each location.
Botanical description and original hand made illustration of three elements of each floral crown.
Descriptions of the importance of the coffee plantation landscape.
The results of social workshops with each community of women.

Participants

The book will include coffee producer organizations from around the world from fifteen selected countries in four continents.

What we want to achieve

The initiative goals include:

Increase the visibility for these women coffee organizations.
Strengthen the cultural and indigenous identity of the members of the organizations.
Promote female empowerment and gender equality in each community and globally.
Support and disseminate sustainable practices in coffee production, which preserve biodiversity and landscape.
Represent the organizations’ work and beauty of shade-grown coffee plantations around the world.
Enrich the experience of coffee consumers about the factors that converge for coffee to be produced.