belated birthday

Belated Birthday

Belated Birthday is an artist project that happens within the month October sometime after my birthday which is on the 3rd. The precedence for Belated Birthday is informed by the birthdays that I've thrown myself while I was an adult living in the DC Metro area by making the traditional meals of my family heritage and sharing them with friends.The impetus behind this activity is to draw together the people I care about and provide for them. Providing for others is an activity in which I hold in high regard, and my birthday is the perfect time to summon those important to me together for the purposes of relaxation and enjoyment. At this gathering, once we’ve sat down to eat, guests are prompted to share about an instance where they experienced a mixing of cultures in a round robin story share.

Belated Birthday

The first installment of this ongoing practice too place in October 2017 and involved preparing a subversion of my grandmother’s traditional meatballs and eggplant gravy for the PSU Art and Social Practice cohort at the time. The meal was prepared in Portland at the home of and in collaboration with Shoshana Gugenheim Kedem and family. The family keeps a Kosher Kitchen, which required an alteration to the traditional recipes including the omission entirely of dairy, and the requirement that the meat used be Kosher.

In addition to specific guidelines regarding the ingredients, we also had to Kosher the kitchen utensils and cookware. This process involves running boiling water over each instrument and container. Once this process has been done we created a "Meat Kitchen," which allowed for the preparation of the meal.

While cooking the meal I taught Shoshana's children about a tradition of my own called "Stealing a Meatball." Often conducted by a matriarch of the family a process of permitting a young person to have one meatball before dinner while the sauce slowly simmers to perfection. This meatball was their first ever, and later we sang the meatball song that up until Belated Birthday was their only knowledge of meatballs.

The event continued on as guests arrived and the meal was shared with the larger community of the Social Practice program. The intention to bring people together, share a meal, and exchange time and attention together under one roof was satisfied.

Once the meal was done leftover packages were made for members of the community that could not make it to the event. All of the instruments and containers were Koshered once more returning the kitchen to its Kosher state.

Belated Birthday Too

Belated Birthday Too took place in October 2018 and involved preparing an interpretation of my Aunt Elba’s Puerto Rican Ecuadorian Beef Stew for old friends in Alfred New York. The meal was prepared in the home of and in collaboration with Samantha and Andrew Wiechert. During the event Samantha shot footage for the third installment of the documentary series they’ve been shooting of me called Sustenance and Spectacle (Part 1 / Part 2).

I prepared the meal with assistance from Andrew and close friend and former student Cassandra Bull. Together we hosted Jake Manning and Theadora Frost, friends from Portland who just moved to Alfred to begin the painting MFA program. During the meal diners were encouraged to share stories about the mixing of culture.

Andrew shared a story involving spending time with his marine platoon sharing daily meals with an Afghan community while on deployment during wartime with Afghanistan.

Belated Birthday Also

Belated Birthday Also took place in my own Portland based home in October 2019 featuring a meal I learned while visiting my cousins in german called Labskaus. The dish features a puree of boiled potatoes and beets combined with corned beef. The purple puree is served alongside Polish Rollmops (a pickled herring fish roll), small pickles, and egg. When the meal was made for me originally I wasn’t eating carbs and so my cousin Anja used broccoli instead. A subversion I made and noted in this iteration as well. I made the meal for the first years in the PSU Art and Social Practice program, the first collective meal for them since starting the program, mirroring an element from the original Belated Birthday,