El Amor de la Vida
The effects of colonization have forced indigenous groups to lose their ancestor’s generational knowledge. Indigenous Mesoamerican groups believed in cycles and one must give to receive. I designed a cutting board that encourages a more holistic form of cooking through the spiritual lens of exchange. I discovered when one invests time, love, and passion into preparing a meal they exchange that care for the meal which is then consumed. That food gets further exchanged into life itself, and with that life, a loved one has the power to do anything. When my family feeds me they provide me with limitless opportunities.
The documentation of recipes is nonexistent within my family and is slowly lost through time. Using inspiration from Indigenous art I designed a modernized system of hieroglyphs to burn my grandma’s recipe for mole verde into wooden tablets preserving her knowledge. The cutting board is intentionally designed for my grandma’s way of cooking as she does not measure the quantities of ingredients and pinches them in the meal as needed. By using the cutting board and recipe tablets, my family can seamlessly learn about and integrate our ancestor's lost practice into their everyday lives.
Recipe Board
The hieroglyphs were burned into a plank of wood using a hand held wood burner. The act of permanently burning these symbols into wood is meaningful because it solidifies my family’s history. Making a physical recipe board makes my ancestry tangible and the artifact will live on for many generations to come.
Modernized Hieroglyphs
These are symbols representing food and kitchen items used to record my Grandmother's recipe for Mole Verde. These symbols were inspired by Indigenous hieroglyphs and were modernized with the current ways of design thinking.
Cutting Board
This cutting board is a tool to encourage practice and the recipe board is a tool to record history. I created a functional artifact that seamlessly integrates Indigenous ways of thinking into the kitchen to allow my family to reflect on our forgotten culture.
Wall of Gratitude
This is a very important wall within the space. Over my time working in white institutions and studying within them I’ve noticed the severe lack of representation with people who look like me, act like me, and think like me. I would not be here today if my Abuelos did not choose to leave their entire lives behind in Mexico just to give me a chance to have what I have today. The least I can do is bring them with me. I know that without these people in my life, my work could not have taken its form. Whether it’s learning from my Tio, asking my mother for help with translations, or even having Te drive me an hour away to pick up a kitchen cabinet, these people are essential to my making process. I learned a lot from asking these people to write anything they wanted to say. I learned that my Abuela never learned how to read or write, and how my dad is self-cautious about his writing. I learned that these people in my life have never been asked to write about themselves. They were never given the space to do so.
Just like home
Continuing this journey of learning from home I needed to re-experience the spaces I grew up in; My Abuela’s, Grandma’s house, my childhood home, and so many others. I needed to experience the space and look at the details and understand what cooking means to me and what value lies between every overlooked glace as a child. My Abuelita always had crooked frames in her living room and small trinkets in her kitchen that would fill the space with so much character. It wasn’t only the food that made the space special but the heart that went into the spaces.
La Cocina
When Designing my studio I remembered my research while studying my grandma and Abuela’s homes. My inspiration was to create a space that felt familiar to those in which I grew up. There was so much humanity behind those spaces which contrasted heavily with spaces in the typical high-end art scene. Everything is perfect and you are supposed to forget someone was behind the making of the work. I decided to push against the grain and create a space like my family’s homes that should be considered high art instead of forcing their spaces into these
euro-centric institutional standards.
