© Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda
Remediating Mama Pina’s Cookbook
Remediating Mama Pina’s Cookbook explores the family cookbook as an archival technology through which gender roles, social status and cultural memories are passed on from generation to generation. It consists of various acts of remediation that attempt to reactivate and unpack the affective traces left in the handwritten record and the absences produced by it as it passed down from generation to generation. It includes a video that records my attempts at learning the different handwriting styles recorded in a family cookbook of food recipes and knitting instructions that belonged to my great grandmother, Mama Pina. The cookbook was passed on to my grandmother and then to my mother who continued with the process. A second part of the project consists of mapping and documenting the collaborations of friends and colleagues who were invited to respond to some of the recipes from the cookbook in the media of their choice. A third component of the project is another video that records the hosting of a dinner of meals cooked from the cookbook. Through various acts of remediation, this project explores how digital technologies are transforming and disrupting our conceptions of what constitutes an archive; the relation between the content and the form of the archive; and the tensions between performative forms and recorded forms of transferring knowledge, cultural memories and social identities or what Diana Taylor refers to as the distinction between the archive and the repertoire (Taylor, 2007).
Remediating Mama Pina’s Cookbook is part of a broader and on-going exploration on the role of women as agents and producers of the archive, which considers female reproductive labor, ephemeral and domestic forms of writing and material culture —traditionally viewed as outside of the archive— as central foci of the archive.
Biography
Gabriela Aceves Sepulveda is a cultural historian and interdisciplinary media artist working at the intersections of video and performance with a research focus on feminist media, visual culture and Latin American art history. Her work explores changing conceptions of what constitutes an archive in the context of the emergence of new media technologies and on the archive’s historical role in the production of knowledge in and about Latin America including the exclusions this role has produced throughout the modern history of the region. She teaches in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University.
