Bárbara Prada, Memory Shop

This project is the result of a yearlong process of artistic and personal research. The investigation covers two domains: food and memory, which are interconnected in our daily life. The aim is to develop different discourses around these topics. This quest is driven by my personal experiences and questions such as: How can we use food memories to deepen our understanding of reality? How do human cells store memories related to food? How does food influence our identity? How do rituals and diets change our perception? How does food allow us to reconnect with the absent: space, time and feelings? These questions form the first part of my experiment. The second part of my work revolves around: How food can also be used as a powerful metaphor to develop critical reflection on our society and its ethics. The project starts with the analysis of how humans use food: food as giver of love and pleasure, as used to bring people together, as used to sustain us, as used in politics, as a weapon, and as art. By researching all these different subject matters, I have been led down new paths. My main focus as a starting point has been to use myself as the experimentation vehicle. Using my own memory food ‘baggage’; as the subject and the object, as the researcher and the guinea. In terms of the process of my experiments giving value to my experiences in object form, I aim to discover how important memories are for us, but also how important it is to codify them, to share them for possible future reuse without the need for other investigators to be in the same time and space.