Dinner At Never
Project details
- Year
- 2023
- Programme
- Bachelor – (de)Fine Art
- Practices
- Social
- Minor
- Cultural Diversity
The project is an installation that speculates a fictional event that connects my two families while using my skills as a ceramist, illustrator and lastly maker.
I use ceramics as a medium to create an installation which depicts my Romanian families at a fictional dinner table. I am exploring this stressful and present theme in my life – my relationship with food and my body shaped by my families, through a medium that helped me find peace.
My parents divorced sixteen years ago, so I grew up between the two families they formed separately. I spent the rest of my childhood and teenage hood among the families they formed separately from each other. I was raised in a full-time patriarchal system in my father’s house and a part time whatever system happened in my mother’s house.
It is fictional because it is happening in an uncertain time and space with people from my direct family that are either dead or would never sit at the same table. The work is an ensemble of ceramic plates carefully seated while illustrating my story. The plates are accompanied by a table cloth collage made out from heavily decorated mușama.
Working with ceramics is genuinely creating a time and a space where I can enjoy myself without feeling any kind of pressure. Using this new medium is an attempt to reclaim power over my position within my families while making sense of a system that formed me.
The installation is an ensemble of ceramic plates on which I illustrated various kinds of foods. Each guest “invited” at the dinner has a plate and a certain dish or aliments that I think portrays them. My projection of them is mirrored by the size and shape of the plate they get and the food on them. I am thinking about this approach as a commentary.
To reflect how I experienced the hierarchical system in my families, I assigned different shapes and sizes based on my family member’s profiles.
For example, my big brother (thirty-one years old), and dad have the biggest plates because they are adult men, and dad is also the main provider for his family.
Since my mom never got remarried, she remained the head of her house, so I decided to give her a big plate too. My younger sibling (ten years old) has a plate smaller than our big brothers’ but bigger than mine. Since he is a boy, he is allowed to eat more, but because he is still young his plate is not one of the biggest yet.
My grandmothers have the smallest plates because they would always eat leftovers so we would have enough tasty food, always nurturing and taking care from behind of the entire household but no one would publicly acknowledge this.
My youngest sibling (six years old) is autistic and the way I experienced his place in this family is nothing but ordinary.
My stepmom and I have the same size, which is neither the smallest nor the biggest, it has a balanced size. Since I am an adult woman now, she and I form a small community and the general expectation from us is to maintain a certain nice to look at image.
Finally, the bread plate represents the projection of the communist generational trauma on my families. Coming back to the present the need of eating bread might not be that necessary since we have access to actual nutritional products, but for my parents or grandmothers, bread is still part of their eating routine whether it actually makes sense to eat it or not. My mother eats bread as a coping mechanism when she is stressed or anxious. The bread plate is my projection on how I see my families – many times it makes more harm than good, accessible, it has zero nutritional benefits but still we are taught to have it no matter what.
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