El Sabor de Memoria

Family albums are not the only objects through which memories and traditions are passed from one generation to the next. Recipes and food carry family histories in many of the same ways. Like photographs, recipes require storytelling, repetition, and participation to fully communicate their meaning; while a recipe records ingredients and instructions, its significance lies in the memories attached to it. El Sabor de Memoria explores this relationship between food, memory, and family history through the story of my Cuban grandmother, Lela, and her experience with dementia. Food has always been central to my family, with Lela expressing care through cooking and bringing generations together around the table. As her dementia progressed, one of the earliest losses was her ability to cook. Recipes she had prepared from memory for decades became unfamiliar, revealing that although the recipes remained, the knowledge needed to bring them to life had disappeared. Her worn, handwritten recipe book, originally brought from Cuba, became both a family archive and the conceptual foundation of the project.

 

Watching Lela struggle to recognize familiar recipes, stories, and even family photographs led me to question what remains when memory begins to disappear. I began to understand that photographs and recipes do not preserve memories on their own; they preserve traces that become meaningful through storytelling and shared experience. El Sabor de Memoria explores this idea through photography, ceramics, writing, sound, and installation, treating recipes and photographs as complementary forms of family archive. El Sabor de Memoria considers how memory, identity, and cultural tradition can be preserved and reconstructed through the objects, rituals, and stories passed between generations.