Pass Again Through the Heart: Gesture, Memory, and Food

Symposium:


Title:
  • Pass Again Through the Heart: Gesture, Memory, and Food

Organiser/Presenter(s):


Statement:

  • This workshop looks at how knowledge is shared through gestures and feelings by family members. It is informed by an ongoing project that collects recipes from Canadian immigrants and refugees, each touching on acknowledgment and formation of transnational identities within North America. This series explores multi-directional approaches to cultural food practices, the bodies that preserve them, and the media that moves this information within the viewing format of a transmedia essay film.

    Knowledge of practice and feelings are carried across borders. The histories that are shared between parent and child, aunties, sisters, brothers, and chosen family are guided by multi-generational narratives that consist of bodies, things, events, and environments. We wish to highlight commonalities in transnational experiences while expanding on a specific type of intergenerational knowledge sharing— one that, at once, preserves approaches, information, and traditions, creates feeling for processes, smells, taste, as well as transforms, hybridizes and responds to contexts around food as a cultural practice.

    This workshop applies a series of different data recording processes to represent dialogues weaved by collective experience to create an interface for diasporic identities to talk about migration, community, political conflicts, mourning, healing, and transformation. These technologies include photogrammetry, non-optical motion capturing, videography, and audio recording, all these techniques come together to support the oral testimonies, object-centred narratives, and transmedia storytelling. We are exploring the generative and expressive possibilities of recording rather than capturing and domesticating human movement through a scientific management of labour. We take note of how Eduardo Galeano reminds us that to remember (recordar) is to pass again (re) through the heart (corazón).

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