A mí de pequeñita me daban nostalgia a cucharadas
2024
Installation
La Casa Encendida
Madrid
Part of Generaciones
Images © Maru Serrano / LCE
When I was little, they gave me nostalgia by the spoonful — marks an early step in my research on food as an element that sustains us and preserves our cultural traditions. The project takes shape as a multidisciplinary installation in which I draw upon the various media that accompany my practice.
For me, cooking is an act deeply tied to the concepts of home, community, and sustenance. Cooking speaks to us of connection — with stories, people, places, lives, ingredients… Cooking brings us closer to who we are. It offers safety and comfort amidst so much uncertainty. Cooking is also a way of traveling through time, bringing ancestral wisdom and building the future. At the same time, cooking (and eating) are acts that require deep presence.
Starting from the Yoruba proverb “Aye loja, Orun nile,” which means “the earth is a market, the sky our home,” and in line with the symbolic journey that characterizes my work, I return to my own memories to reimagine this space of exchange and connection.
“I come from a market. My family home is in the heart of a market, though it wasn’t always that way. At first, there was nothing, and over time it was built up around the house, creating labyrinths and inviting inhabitation. There are people there, and spirits too — those who have died and those who have not yet been born. They come to the market to buy, sell, and investigate.
No one lives in our house anymore, though some come and go. Instead, it is inhabited by spirits who were meant to come buy and return to the sky, but couldn’t. That’s why the patio has become a restaurant open to the public. There, food from the SW and NW regions of Cameroon is served, and every day, children, elders, street vendors, bayam-sellam, bensikineurs, and even a spirit or two come by.”
This project understands cooking as the ability to experiment, as a web of connections and “possibilities of,” as well as the stories that can be told through the process. To do this, I work with photographs, objects, and ingredients, as well as text — generating this confluence of organic and inorganic elements. The result highlights the power each of these elements holds in defining identities, stories, and communities.