Multiplicities and Mutualities…at the Table

About the Project

Decoding Beans and Rice This piece traces the personal histories of beans and rice dishes, which when used together form a grammar as a set above and beyond what they signify as individual food items. Beans and rice dishes are found all over the world, but particularly follow the route of African diaspora, into the Caribbean, and the United States. In this piece, friends watch me over Zoom as they instruct me in their method of preparing a beans and rice dish of significance to them. While we cook, we discuss the dish’s meaning and associated memories. As is so often the case, food functions as an excuse or entry point into larger dialogues. Through this process we explore:

The potential of the table to be a place of exchange or erasure when cultures come together
Cooking (traditionally women’s work) as an art practice and a performance of care
The nuance of identity through individual expressions of foods with cultural significance
Remembering as a form of resistance

After completing the six performances over several months of being instructed in the making of their dish, I set the virtual table with a photograph of each dish and a photograph of the tablecloth I made to “host” my guests. The tablecloth is a cyanotype print on fabric of a pattern made from beans and rice.

Click on each dish below to explore its memory.

Creolization is not something that disturbs a given culture from the inside, even if we know that a number of cultures have been and will be dominated, assimilated, brought to the brink of disappearance. Beyond these often disastrous conditions, it acts to maintain relation between two or more cultural ‘zones’ brought together in a meeting place, just as a Creole language functions on the basis of differentiated linguistic ‘zones’ to take from them its new substance…Creolization is unpredictable, it is never fixed, or stopped, or inscribed in essences or absolutes of identity. To accept that the being changes while remaining is not to veer towards an absolute. What remains in the changing or the change or the exchange is perhaps first of all the inclination or the daring to change.

– Édouard Glissant

Essay and Collaborative Storytelling: Unusual Paths to Cooking Beans and Rice | Chocolate Beans and Rice

When I was in New York during the first summer of our Art Practice journey, I went to a locally owned music shop in Spanish Harlem. Everything for sale in this store was music related – records, CDs, even cassette tapes, instruments, and a few books. The one exception was that someone had taken the time to handcraft magnets. The magnets were dollhouse miniature-sized plates of beans and rice, complete with a sunny side up egg and a tiny Puerto Rican flag (Figure 8). The beans and rice were the real, uncooked comestibles preserved in lacquer. The eggs were made of small white circles cut out of foam craft sheets with smaller yellow circles of the same material glued onto the center. Even to an outsider, the aura of these lovingly created intimisms revealed the importance of beans, rice, and egg on a plate, and made a statement about identity that their creator knew other people would recognize. (more…)