In 1930, the poet José Bergamín wrote La decadencia del analfabetismo [The Decline of Illiteracy], a lecture in which he denounced the destruction of the oral culture of the rural peasantry. The imposition of written text was, in his view, a way of destroying the creative power of spoken language—the word of mouth—that existed in popular culture. This obsession with granting such prestige to the written word became so extreme that, in Bergamín’s own words, “people ended up finding letters even in their soup,” referring to alphabet-shaped pasta.

Inspired by this metaphor, on May 25, 2025, Irene Ortega López and Roberto Herrero García organized the workshop Letters Even in the Soup, with the aim of exploring the creative and plastic dimensions of language in rural oral traditions. The gathering took place in the city of Cáceres, Extremadura, which allowed for dialogue with the region’s unique linguistic situation, where three groups of native speech varieties, various dialects, and different forms of mal hablau [foul-mouthed] Spanish have historically coexisted. The project aimed to reclaim the living, flexible, and performative nature of all these languages. Specifically, it focused on the playful side of popular speech, where word invention and the joy of babbling are common. To create an edible trace of the workshop’s exercises, they recorded this audiovisual piece in which they sit at the table to enjoy a bowl of alphabet soup.