The echoes of silence (working title)

PROJECT

The echoes of silence (working title)

To migrate is to become entangled between wet tongues
through which words slip,
navigating verbs in parallel tenses.

The Echoes of Silence –working title– is a long-term research-creation project developed with transatlantic ingredients. Each stage of the process unfolds into different forms of sharing: readings, publications, installations, performances, dialogues, and dinners. The project seeks to weave networks of affinity through artistic practice, tracing a past-present narrative of migration. What are the echoes in the unfolding of a migration process? What do we cook when we are far from home?

Writing/reading takes the form of chronicles. Writing about migration becomes an exercise in thinking-and-doing with the whole body—a way of writing to “idear” (Anzaldúa, 2015). These textualities, together with cooking, form the core of this project. Writing/reading is done with the body, cooking is done with the body, and these actions give rise to somatic practices and gestures. Connecting migration with textualities and cooking activates conversations and embodies lived experiences of foreignness.

At the same time, –plant based– food acts as a way to soothe homesickness. The ingredients we cook will nourish this research both as a remedy and as a witness to the journeys they’ve traveled to reach our hands. Fruits and vegetables act as materials imbued with memory, archiving a story of migration and globalization. 

The interest is to study these geographic movements and their relation to human migration, and to collect and write stories of migration and globalization.

Violence reproduces itself, twists and squeezes 
during wordless service.
The silence at the service of history.

Stef Assandri

UR
Stef Assandri’s artistic practice involves textualities, costume design, cooking, and research-creation. In recent years, they have been exploring and investigating practices that connect topics such as migration, gender, and speciesism.

Iris Donders

1992 NL
Iris Donders is a transdisciplinary artist who is interested in exploring the relationships with(in) the more-than-human worlds, starting from material-based research. She traces the journey of these materials—their past, their present and the futures they might inhabit.