She Taught Me Salt, She Gave Me Sweetness (2025, WIP)
Residenza Lago Scuro
Edible Altar, Participatory Performance
The work emerged from a study of salt as a vessel of memory, healing, and transformation in relation to the Black ancestral and embodied trauma. But the land revealed another layer: sweetness. Guided by Oshun, Orisha of fresh waters and beauty, and Yemaya, mother of the ocean, the altar unites salt and sweetness in a communal act of nourishment. During the ceremony, through singing and humming, sound became a somatic thread, creating a shared rhythm that traced emotion, memory, and ancestral presence, turning ritual into a living, collective embodiment.
The altar took form as an edible offering, inviting participants to eat, touch, and commune. I worked with a range of salt-based culinary techniques such as lactofermenting, curing and salt baking to explore preservation and transformation as acts of care. Using herbs and plants gathered from the land around me, I crafted a salt blend to cure the pumpkin and dust the honey cake, the land itself emerging as an active collaborator. The blend can be used culinarily, for seasoning and preserving, and curatively, for restorative baths. Salt doesn’t just season food, it reduces our perception of bitterness and enhances sweetness. Grief, when honoured, can make way for joy. And ancestral memory, when tended to with care, becomes nourishment.
Early in the residency, I fell ill, and the work could not be completed as planned, becoming a living process rather than a completed installation. This interruption became part of the piece itself: a reminder of the body’s limits and its ongoing negotiation with care, healing, and creation. She Taught Me Salt, She Gave Me Sweetness continues to evolve, carrying forward the tenderness and transformation that illness revealed.
Pumpkin five ways (pumpkin seed emulsion, fermented pumpkin seed salt, cured pumpkin, lactofermented pumpkin, salt-baked pumpkin), honey cake, coconut cream, local honey, sea salt, oranges, cinnamon, persimmon, river water, river stone, egg.)
