Diana Campbell Reveals Her Top Five Recent Obsessions

The Sagan Kotturan Chamoru Center in Guam has a bunch of little houses, each with a different function. In one dedicated to cooking, they re-created this kind of brick oven called a hotno, on which an Indigenous Chamorro elder was conducting a workshop. These traditional ovens came to Guam by way of Spanish colonizers, as Indigenous Mesoamericans traveled to the Pacific Island. It’s interesting to see how Mesoamericans brought food like chili peppers to Guam before it traveled to places in Central Asia. Even though these places may seem peripheral, they were very important to societal development at different times. The hotno is an entry point to consider how interconnected we are—not to mention the many delicious things cooked in it!

Xuanzang, a 7th-century Chinese monk, made a 17-year pilgrimage from China to India by way of Uzbekistan to study Buddhism at the world’s first residential university, Nalanda, in Bihar, India. As a center of knowledge, Nalanda was destroyed by Turkic invaders, and remained lost until a Scottish surveyor discovered the ruins in the 19th century. To identify the place, they consulted Xuanzang’s texts. It’s not only an example of the longtime existence of globalization but also the lasting impact of knowledge and writing. It’s a way to look to the past to reconstruct what is missing. Several artists in the Bukhara Biennial have been inspired by Xuanzang, and he helps me think about charting the world differently.

A lot of artists and thinkers who come to the Biennial will likely visit the shrine of Qizbibi, a 13th-century Sufi saint in Bukhara. She had a school where she taught and hosted those on religious pilgrimages, but a lot of the history of female spiritual leaders has been erased. The site is a beautiful and moving place dedicated to an unexpected female spiritual leader from that time.

As I’ve been working on the Biennial, I’ve been doing a lot of research on cooking, healing, and poetry. In so doing, I found that Rumi went to Uzbekistan and wrote about Bukhara. He has these incredible metaphors about love and relationships, including one about cooking a chickpea. Transforming chickpeas from raw to cooked speaks to a larger spiritual transformation. It can be painful and difficult, but that change is necessary for both individuals and the larger collective.

Pivô Coatí in Salvador, Brazil, is one of architect Lina Bo Bardi’s masterpieces. Constructed around a mango tree in the 1980s, it was intended to be a restaurant, but it never opened. It’s a stunning non-rectangular structure, with details like grooves in the concrete that were based on the folds of a leaf. Bo Bardi was a woman ahead of her time, thinking about working with artisans and nature when she considered what a museum should be. It’s also built on a street where the Portuguese would bring slaves up from the sea, as Salvador is South America’s closest point to West Africa. I’m working in partnership with the Hartwig Art Foundation in Amsterdam and individuals in São Paulo to turn this into an art center.