'Fusion Identities - The Recipe Format' is a digital collage and photography artwork that speaks to the hybrid identities and communities of neighbourhoods. Through collective food-making and fusion recipes, the work engages with urban spaces whose identities, human and non-human, are never fixed: neighbourhoods can be gentrified, communities are ever-evolving. They are melting pots of various mutual exchanges of stories, experiences, knowledges, generations and cultures that continuously transform with time.
'Fusion Identities - The Recipe Format' explores the notion of time through intergenerational food-making practices and asks: which recipe and food processes are being passed on? Which aspects will be remembered and which will be hybridized into new ones? This hybridity highlights the ever-evolving diversity of urban spaces as a place for innovation, life and new ideas towards strong local identities and pride.
Through food and food-making as a collective and timeless activity, the work visualises fusion identities to represent the hybrid communities of diverse and intergenerational neighbourhoods. The work invites people to write up recipes, real or fictional, in the accompanying notebook, to reflect on their local area and its communities. At the end of the exhibition, a copy of the notebook will be made available digitally, and a physical copy can be sent via post at the notebook participants' wishes.
By correlating diverse local environments with everyday food tasks, the artwork hopes to highlight the value of diversity and hybridity in increasingly complex urban spaces.
What is the recipe of your local area? What will it be two decades ahead?
'Fusion Identities - The Recipe Format' explores the notion of time through intergenerational food-making practices and asks: which recipe and food processes are being passed on? Which aspects will be remembered and which will be hybridized into new ones? This hybridity highlights the ever-evolving diversity of urban spaces as a place for innovation, life and new ideas towards strong local identities and pride.
Through food and food-making as a collective and timeless activity, the work visualises fusion identities to represent the hybrid communities of diverse and intergenerational neighbourhoods. The work invites people to write up recipes, real or fictional, in the accompanying notebook, to reflect on their local area and its communities. At the end of the exhibition, a copy of the notebook will be made available digitally, and a physical copy can be sent via post at the notebook participants' wishes.
By correlating diverse local environments with everyday food tasks, the artwork hopes to highlight the value of diversity and hybridity in increasingly complex urban spaces.
What is the recipe of your local area? What will it be two decades ahead?
WORK IN PROGRESS PICTURES
1. food-making with next generation
2. final picture editing in progress
3. inspiration for inherited food recipes 1
4. inspiration for inherited food recipes 2
1. food-making with next generation
2. final picture editing in progress
3. inspiration for inherited food recipes 1
4. inspiration for inherited food recipes 2
PICTURES FROM EXHIBITION
- all ERASMUS BIP + students
- person writing in recipe notebook with onlookers
- persons writing in recipe notebook
- queue to write in notebook
- persons writin in recipe notebook 2
- onlookers in front of picture
- presenting artwork with translation
- all ERASMUS BIP + students
- person writing in recipe notebook with onlookers
- persons writing in recipe notebook
- queue to write in notebook
- persons writin in recipe notebook 2
- onlookers in front of picture
- presenting artwork with translation
-quick chat with curator Yadira de Armas, who mentioned checking Agnes Essonti Luque, Cameroonian-Spanish artist & curator (practice draws inspiration from postcolonial and black feminist thinkers, alongside themes of ancestral connection, their childhood memories and nostalgia (taken from her website): Yadira mentioned she also works with food and knowledge through recipes. https://essonti.com/
- super inspiring! dig deeper
Translation Elsa Paricio pamphlet (direct translation google translate, no editing)
Two cylinders are seen nestled between the branches of a stone on a cliff. A year has already passed in this corner of the planet, in a silent wait, witnessing the variations of time, which have oscillated between changes in temperature and humidity, as well as the maritime salinity that caresses its surface.
There, he could have rolled and fallen into the shimmering sea of that day, fading into its liquid vastness. When looking at them more closely, something that the simple shape of the cylinder appears: trembling lines of Chinese ink wash their interiors, like an invisible map traced by the evaporation of water and the ink that had once filled them. But these two cylinders remained there anchored in their place, challenging the passage of time and inclement weather. They were objects-landscapes, encapsulating the essence of that cliff, of a whole year, The cylinders were vehicles of memory, time machines, primitive phonographs, Records of a landscape that, over time, was engraved inside. And somehow, a national anthem resounded in those cylinders, the maximum emblem of a "nation-state" that, like them,
Poetic, semantic and 'patriotic', and not only legal) sung in the equally national language", the language that identifies it, in the language that creates it and perpetuates it. Whoever had left them there had to travel, and not only in the physical sense of the term. In his garden, he first travelled in his mind, observing how, day after day, ink and water evaporated from inside a cylinder, leaving traces of black ink on its walls, thin lines that varied depending on their position. That vision was what made her start a physical journey, crossing borders, like birds, until she reached those corners of the country. But there is no journey without departure or return, and the very structure of that trip already contained the narrative, because the traveller had witnessed the becoming of the landscape, of the transformation of the place, and therefore became a narrator in her own right. Over the long of six years, she travelled the country, Distributing thousands of cylinders in hundreds of places. Each of them was a fascicle of a collective memory, a page that narrated the identity of the country.
It was like a national library, scattered, fragmented, but alive in its dispersion.
Each cylinder invited us to immerse ourselves in the depths of what we think we know, and then take us further, to what we still do not know of that country that we call home. Between the branches, the traveler's hand lurts. He spreads slowly, his fingers run over the rough surface, cling to one, then to another, and examines them calmly, while holding a mobile in the other hand. The satisfaction of seeing that they were still there, whole, intact, against all odds, briefly invaded him. The stillness of that moment vanished, as it always did, as his mind slid into the memories. The thousands of cylinders he had left behind, scattered in forgotten mines, in factories crumbled by time, already empty of life, in houses about to collapse, in old trees and deteriorated breadhouses, in basements where life did not resonate, extended in his memory, an endless succession of fragmented images.
The broken cylinders, covered with Chinese ink, that ink that had marked, indelible, the cups that rested messy, piled up. In the back of his mind, the conscious choice of those places resounded. Cemeteries, prey, the passage of time that had stripped them of all function, but not of their history, not of their original form. He remembered a particular photograph, one that captured the exact place Where he had left the cylinders, now buried under a pile of rubble.
The ground, which had previously been firm, suddenly gave way, falling apart, and now, looking at what was once an accessible place, he could not reach it to recover what he had left there. For hours, he insisted on removing the debris. However, a doubt paralyzed her in the middle of the task. Should I move on?
Should you risk accessing the place and maybe losing something else? The idea of dying lurked in her mind, although only she knew it. She was kept in the darkest corners of her memory, like those short, vertical videos, full of an emotion so deep and personal that only she was able to understand. Videos that he had recorded to testify to his own search. In them, the sound of the place merged with the images, the noises of the environment were trapped next to their presence, like a distant echo. He thought about how, every time he related what he had done, people were interested in something that seemed so alien to them.
People asked him where he lived, where he had sneaked, how all that displacement, that performance of living in his car, of tracking cylinders throughout the country, had become part of his identity. He smiled when he remembered the fear that had invaded him when entering some of those places, when the darkness and desolation were perceived so vividly. He especially remembered an abandoned place, where, when he entered, he found a stone with his last name inscribed.
And he decided to leave. The fear had been too much. But even so, she had sneaked into all those places alone, in violent places that were scary to the point of freaking out. Sometimes, birds were what scared her the most. As I shared what I had done
-Traveling alone for six years, in her car, through unknown places, looking for something that only she understood- the project acquired another dimension. It was not only a physical and mental exercise, but also a deeply personal act. But, in addition to that, I thought that videos and photographs were not just memories
They were documents of truthfulness, something like the archive that gave substance to everything I had lived, as if by capturing the essence of a place, of a specific moment, I could rescue something from the lost reality.
The finding, the discovery, the restlessness of unveiling the hidden, had always been ideas that had captivated her, that had been somehow interwoven in their practice.
She remembered, for example, when they opened the tomb of Tutankhamun, and how the first record had been a rudimentary record of something transcendental. Somehow, he had always seen his photographs, those he took when he put the cylinders in the places and then recovered them, as something secondary to the project itself, as attachments that gave context but were not the focus. However, by leaving them in the background, he was losing something fundamental, something that was the key to understanding the magnitude of what he was doing. Those photos and videos were not mere memories or simple illustrations of what was lived, he thought. They were the find. They were what gave reality to everything he had done. It was fucking crazy, yes. But it was also what the world needed to see to understand the true Scope of what was happening in those places. There were cylinders in an anthill, and others closer to bones that had come out of a grave in a cemetery. It was all like that, I thought. He had placed cylinders in castles, houses, farms, high in the mountains, even using stairs to place them in a cemetery. When I remembered it, I felt a deep emotion. It was something that only she knew, a visceral experience that only she had lived, a silent madness that had marked her life. Each of those cylinders represented more than a simple object left in one place. It was a decision, a choice to be there, in those remote and forgotten places. It was surprising that, after a year, some of those cylinders were still there, intact, defying the passage of time. And that permanence reflected, in some way, the life that still beat in those places. It was horn if the cylinders were witnesses of a story that did not want to be forgotten. One of the fundamental ideas that led her to create the project was that strange need to understand what was happening in this place where we live, that space that cannot be named. Not as a precise geographical concept, but as an incomprehensible space that, although it has a name, resists being definitively defined. Which led her to a simple but disturbing question: what is a place? That question began to invade her and, in some way, forced her to delimit her own exploration to a piece of land, a fragment of what we call nation. A space shared administratively by more than 50 million people, but that, from the perspective of geological time - and not from the history that tells us what we believe we are -, this country, which cannot be named without dissolving into a series of imprecise meanings, is actually nothing. A void between the past and the future, like a suspended space, devoid of substance, although loaded with names, laws and borders. However, the morphological changes, that permanent transformation of the earth's surface, had determined the history that drags us to this present, to this present. And somehow, the project I was creating also had to confront that temporality, that permanence and decomposition. He thought that the cylinders not only projected their gaze towards millions of years back, but that in some way, they also threw their presence into the future. Those cylinders, small and obvious in their form, but deeply loaded with symbolism, stood as witnesses of a future that did not yet exist but that, like the present, would change. At some point, this same place we step on would stop being what it is, and no one or nothing could relate it with the same name. It would no longer be the same, even if time covered it with a similar appearance. And that, I thought, was the essence of what I wanted to say. When observing the work he had created, he felt that he had managed to give a sense of the "national" to an installation without ever specifying what nation it was, without being tied to a single concept, letting each spectator project his own understanding of "house", "region" or "country". It was not something she imposed, but something that the viewer went through, a projection Implicit in the object. It was as if, instead of defining, she let the project itself be defined in every look, in every interpretation. And when sitting with the dor cylinders that he had just rescued, one in each hand, one more idea became present The idea of the body, of duality, of the reason why he had always placed those cylinders in different corners of this country. He thought about his partner, his family. In the relationships of what we call "the other" and "the house". What happens to two bodies that go through time at the same time, he wondered. This idea of the pair of the double, of the same but different, seemed particularly interesting to him. No one had mentioned that notion of "pair" in such radical terms, that constant tension between the near and the distant, between the familiar and the other. It was as if, when facing the outside world, he was crossing a limit, challenging an invisible border that separated what he recognized as his from the unknown, the other. And he asked himself: who manages to cross that threshold? Who manages to get out of the familiar and move around the world without seeing the familiar reflected in it? Sometimes it seemed that the relationship with the "outside" was nonsense, impossible, but it was that Need to confront him, which drove her to move forward. I also thought that the cylinders, those simple objects, contained the narration of all this time, of that space suspended between what has been and what will be. The notion of time was inscribed in that fixed object that he held in his hands. Something in the stillness of the cylinder revealed how the time of nature, that time that happens in silence and without haste, coexists with human time, the one we measure, the one we live, but that we do not perceive in the same way. His time, hers, was marked by action, by movement, but the time of the cylinder seemed an eternal time, impassive, imperturbable, as a reminder of the true nature of things. Both times, his and that of nature, happened at the same time, but they could not be perceived with the same eyes. He couldn't help but get closer to everything unknown from the family, as if everything he touched had to have, somehow, a link with what he already knew. But, at the same time, I knew that there was something else, something that escaped that logic. Something I had to explore, regardless of the borders I established, regardless of the answers I would never find.
Feeling the sea on the cliff, he got up with the two cylinders in his hands, and walked, unhurriedly, in the direction of others who were waiting somewhere hidden.
Tiago de Abreu Pinto
Commissioner
Translation Elsa Paricio pamphlet (direct translation google translate, no editing)
Two cylinders are seen nestled between the branches of a stone on a cliff. A year has already passed in this corner of the planet, in a silent wait, witnessing the variations of time, which have oscillated between changes in temperature and humidity, as well as the maritime salinity that caresses its surface.
There, he could have rolled and fallen into the shimmering sea of that day, fading into its liquid vastness. When looking at them more closely, something that the simple shape of the cylinder appears: trembling lines of Chinese ink wash their interiors, like an invisible map traced by the evaporation of water and the ink that had once filled them. But these two cylinders remained there anchored in their place, challenging the passage of time and inclement weather. They were objects-landscapes, encapsulating the essence of that cliff, of a whole year, The cylinders were vehicles of memory, time machines, primitive phonographs, Records of a landscape that, over time, was engraved inside. And somehow, a national anthem resounded in those cylinders, the maximum emblem of a "nation-state" that, like them,
Poetic, semantic and 'patriotic', and not only legal) sung in the equally national language", the language that identifies it, in the language that creates it and perpetuates it. Whoever had left them there had to travel, and not only in the physical sense of the term. In his garden, he first travelled in his mind, observing how, day after day, ink and water evaporated from inside a cylinder, leaving traces of black ink on its walls, thin lines that varied depending on their position. That vision was what made her start a physical journey, crossing borders, like birds, until she reached those corners of the country. But there is no journey without departure or return, and the very structure of that trip already contained the narrative, because the traveller had witnessed the becoming of the landscape, of the transformation of the place, and therefore became a narrator in her own right. Over the long of six years, she travelled the country, Distributing thousands of cylinders in hundreds of places. Each of them was a fascicle of a collective memory, a page that narrated the identity of the country.
It was like a national library, scattered, fragmented, but alive in its dispersion.
Each cylinder invited us to immerse ourselves in the depths of what we think we know, and then take us further, to what we still do not know of that country that we call home. Between the branches, the traveler's hand lurts. He spreads slowly, his fingers run over the rough surface, cling to one, then to another, and examines them calmly, while holding a mobile in the other hand. The satisfaction of seeing that they were still there, whole, intact, against all odds, briefly invaded him. The stillness of that moment vanished, as it always did, as his mind slid into the memories. The thousands of cylinders he had left behind, scattered in forgotten mines, in factories crumbled by time, already empty of life, in houses about to collapse, in old trees and deteriorated breadhouses, in basements where life did not resonate, extended in his memory, an endless succession of fragmented images.
The broken cylinders, covered with Chinese ink, that ink that had marked, indelible, the cups that rested messy, piled up. In the back of his mind, the conscious choice of those places resounded. Cemeteries, prey, the passage of time that had stripped them of all function, but not of their history, not of their original form. He remembered a particular photograph, one that captured the exact place Where he had left the cylinders, now buried under a pile of rubble.
The ground, which had previously been firm, suddenly gave way, falling apart, and now, looking at what was once an accessible place, he could not reach it to recover what he had left there. For hours, he insisted on removing the debris. However, a doubt paralyzed her in the middle of the task. Should I move on?
Should you risk accessing the place and maybe losing something else? The idea of dying lurked in her mind, although only she knew it. She was kept in the darkest corners of her memory, like those short, vertical videos, full of an emotion so deep and personal that only she was able to understand. Videos that he had recorded to testify to his own search. In them, the sound of the place merged with the images, the noises of the environment were trapped next to their presence, like a distant echo. He thought about how, every time he related what he had done, people were interested in something that seemed so alien to them.
People asked him where he lived, where he had sneaked, how all that displacement, that performance of living in his car, of tracking cylinders throughout the country, had become part of his identity. He smiled when he remembered the fear that had invaded him when entering some of those places, when the darkness and desolation were perceived so vividly. He especially remembered an abandoned place, where, when he entered, he found a stone with his last name inscribed.
And he decided to leave. The fear had been too much. But even so, she had sneaked into all those places alone, in violent places that were scary to the point of freaking out. Sometimes, birds were what scared her the most. As I shared what I had done
-Traveling alone for six years, in her car, through unknown places, looking for something that only she understood- the project acquired another dimension. It was not only a physical and mental exercise, but also a deeply personal act. But, in addition to that, I thought that videos and photographs were not just memories
They were documents of truthfulness, something like the archive that gave substance to everything I had lived, as if by capturing the essence of a place, of a specific moment, I could rescue something from the lost reality.
The finding, the discovery, the restlessness of unveiling the hidden, had always been ideas that had captivated her, that had been somehow interwoven in their practice.
She remembered, for example, when they opened the tomb of Tutankhamun, and how the first record had been a rudimentary record of something transcendental. Somehow, he had always seen his photographs, those he took when he put the cylinders in the places and then recovered them, as something secondary to the project itself, as attachments that gave context but were not the focus. However, by leaving them in the background, he was losing something fundamental, something that was the key to understanding the magnitude of what he was doing. Those photos and videos were not mere memories or simple illustrations of what was lived, he thought. They were the find. They were what gave reality to everything he had done. It was fucking crazy, yes. But it was also what the world needed to see to understand the true Scope of what was happening in those places. There were cylinders in an anthill, and others closer to bones that had come out of a grave in a cemetery. It was all like that, I thought. He had placed cylinders in castles, houses, farms, high in the mountains, even using stairs to place them in a cemetery. When I remembered it, I felt a deep emotion. It was something that only she knew, a visceral experience that only she had lived, a silent madness that had marked her life. Each of those cylinders represented more than a simple object left in one place. It was a decision, a choice to be there, in those remote and forgotten places. It was surprising that, after a year, some of those cylinders were still there, intact, defying the passage of time. And that permanence reflected, in some way, the life that still beat in those places. It was horn if the cylinders were witnesses of a story that did not want to be forgotten. One of the fundamental ideas that led her to create the project was that strange need to understand what was happening in this place where we live, that space that cannot be named. Not as a precise geographical concept, but as an incomprehensible space that, although it has a name, resists being definitively defined. Which led her to a simple but disturbing question: what is a place? That question began to invade her and, in some way, forced her to delimit her own exploration to a piece of land, a fragment of what we call nation. A space shared administratively by more than 50 million people, but that, from the perspective of geological time - and not from the history that tells us what we believe we are -, this country, which cannot be named without dissolving into a series of imprecise meanings, is actually nothing. A void between the past and the future, like a suspended space, devoid of substance, although loaded with names, laws and borders. However, the morphological changes, that permanent transformation of the earth's surface, had determined the history that drags us to this present, to this present. And somehow, the project I was creating also had to confront that temporality, that permanence and decomposition. He thought that the cylinders not only projected their gaze towards millions of years back, but that in some way, they also threw their presence into the future. Those cylinders, small and obvious in their form, but deeply loaded with symbolism, stood as witnesses of a future that did not yet exist but that, like the present, would change. At some point, this same place we step on would stop being what it is, and no one or nothing could relate it with the same name. It would no longer be the same, even if time covered it with a similar appearance. And that, I thought, was the essence of what I wanted to say. When observing the work he had created, he felt that he had managed to give a sense of the "national" to an installation without ever specifying what nation it was, without being tied to a single concept, letting each spectator project his own understanding of "house", "region" or "country". It was not something she imposed, but something that the viewer went through, a projection Implicit in the object. It was as if, instead of defining, she let the project itself be defined in every look, in every interpretation. And when sitting with the dor cylinders that he had just rescued, one in each hand, one more idea became present The idea of the body, of duality, of the reason why he had always placed those cylinders in different corners of this country. He thought about his partner, his family. In the relationships of what we call "the other" and "the house". What happens to two bodies that go through time at the same time, he wondered. This idea of the pair of the double, of the same but different, seemed particularly interesting to him. No one had mentioned that notion of "pair" in such radical terms, that constant tension between the near and the distant, between the familiar and the other. It was as if, when facing the outside world, he was crossing a limit, challenging an invisible border that separated what he recognized as his from the unknown, the other. And he asked himself: who manages to cross that threshold? Who manages to get out of the familiar and move around the world without seeing the familiar reflected in it? Sometimes it seemed that the relationship with the "outside" was nonsense, impossible, but it was that Need to confront him, which drove her to move forward. I also thought that the cylinders, those simple objects, contained the narration of all this time, of that space suspended between what has been and what will be. The notion of time was inscribed in that fixed object that he held in his hands. Something in the stillness of the cylinder revealed how the time of nature, that time that happens in silence and without haste, coexists with human time, the one we measure, the one we live, but that we do not perceive in the same way. His time, hers, was marked by action, by movement, but the time of the cylinder seemed an eternal time, impassive, imperturbable, as a reminder of the true nature of things. Both times, his and that of nature, happened at the same time, but they could not be perceived with the same eyes. He couldn't help but get closer to everything unknown from the family, as if everything he touched had to have, somehow, a link with what he already knew. But, at the same time, I knew that there was something else, something that escaped that logic. Something I had to explore, regardless of the borders I established, regardless of the answers I would never find.
Feeling the sea on the cliff, he got up with the two cylinders in his hands, and walked, unhurriedly, in the direction of others who were waiting somewhere hidden.
Tiago de Abreu Pinto
Commissioner