Aromas From Home: Cooking Memories Through Complex Salsas
Diverse edible materials and artefacts from Mexico and second-hand objects from Finland.
The installation took place during a Sunday afternoon in my friends’ garden in Kulosaari, Helsinki.
Project featured in the intersectional feminist magazine Astra Issue 1/2024
An edible installation made of objects and salsas, where my personal artistic practice unraveled through culturally familiar food. During this project, cooking became an embodied process of remembering and exploring my own sazón in a new context. Sazón, which I like to describe as cooking intuitively, uses previous food memories to employ the body as an extended tool for making food. Trusting your sazón means rejecting western paradigms of the senses and instead embracing a process where the senses can feed each other and work together. This can include for example, using your hand to measure ingredients, tasting to know what spice is missing, or recalling previous food memories into the making.
Composed of secondhand objects with unknown histories, objects of personal significance and homemade vegan food, “Aromas From Home: Cooking Memories Through Complex Salsas” took place last summer in Helsinki. Twenty-two guests came over, some friends and other strangers, food brought us together. In this installation, the main protagonist was the chili. I chose certain recipes that gave me emotional comfort and reminded me of my mother, while at the same time I added ingredients unfamiliar to the recipes I know. Switching chicken breasts for oyster mushrooms, or sour cream for oat cream. This combination provided me comfort and curiosity about how others experienced the food and related or felt disconnected to this experience.
Composed of secondhand objects with unknown histories, objects of personal significance and homemade vegan food, “Aromas From Home: Cooking Memories Through Complex Salsas” took place last summer in Helsinki. Twenty-two guests came over, some friends and other strangers, food brought us together. In this installation, the main protagonist was the chili. I chose certain recipes that gave me emotional comfort and reminded me of my mother, while at the same time I added ingredients unfamiliar to the recipes I know. Switching chicken breasts for oyster mushrooms, or sour cream for oat cream. This combination provided me comfort and curiosity about how others experienced the food and related or felt disconnected to this experience.