bake traces

to photograph a still life of dirty kitchen utensils and left-over ingredients in a renaissance manner seemed an intuitive thing for me to do. dutch paintings of food and kitchens, documenting haphazardly arranged, or better disarranged, scenes of middle-class life and taste ----

edible rock

i fell in love with wolf lepenies and my cobblestones at the same time.

the similarity of color and texture of the cookies to actual cobblestones is amazing. i plan to spread spice over the center of the hauptmarkt onto its cobblestone pavement. the aromatic spices indicate the square's traditional purpose as a center of commerce. the color, a brownish red which seeps into the gaps between the cobblestones, touches on acts of torture, defamation, and humiliation that took place there in the past. i'll encourage visitors of the hauptmarkt to walk over the spices and thus distribute them over a larger area.

the perfect hausfrau

with my first batch of gingerbread - no, chilibread - cobblestones....super 8 footage coming soon....outfit courtesy of my mom...

nuts in and out of a blender ---- oh, no wait, it's the food processor

variations

i've been working with my mom's recipe for gingerbread but replacing the traditional ingredients - mainly spices from china and india - with native american ingredients, substituting ginger with chili peppers, cinnamon with allspice, almonds and hazelnuts with pecans, walnuts, and cashews, sugar with honey and maple syrup, and flour with cornmeal, and adding lots of cocoa and vanilla. the dough needs to rest for eight days in "the warm kitchen", then i cut and shape it to simulate cobblestones to resemble the pavement of the hauptmarkt. these chilibread cobblestones will serve as the currency to trade stories for food. i intend to give this collection of recorded anecdotes to the city museum of nuremberg.


a page from my mom's cookbook with her and my scribbles: improvements on her part, conversions of measurements on mine.

flüstergewürz

the project's collaborators are my mother, a number of her friends, the city of nuremberg, and potentially matthias dachwald, curator at the kunsthalle nuremberg. the invented name of the project may be translated as "a spice that makes one whisper".

i have been making variations of a recipe for nuernberger lebkuchen, a type of gingerbread originally made 1395 in a bakery near the hauptmarkt - or so the story goes. nuremberg was one of the most northern cities on the extensions of the silk routes; bakers had access to spices from asia through nuremberg's role as a trade center in the middle ages. in this sense, nuremberg has been part of globalization very early on.

for now i've been working mostly with my mom; her friends will help to bake my version of nuremberg gingerbread as a commodity to trade stories for food. i intend to find people who agree to add to nuremberg's chronicles with their own stories and anecdotes related to nuremberg's town square, which i will record. i hope that matthias dachwald accepts that one of his roles in this project will be to act as a mediator between the city of nuremberg's administration officials and me.

this is an advertisement for commercially made nuernberger lebkuchen mailed to my parents. it features the typical shapes the cookies come in: circles, hearts, stars, squares covered with sugar and chocolate frosting.it promotes the company's worldwide delivery service and affirms that the goods are packed "fresh out of the oven" (ofenfrisch verpackt) and sent immediately "on their journey" (auf die Reise).

what do I know

i'm collecting information on the history of the nuremberg hauptmarkt. this image was taken around the same time of my great-grandfather's arrest. at this point the nazis had renamed the hauptmarkt adolf-hitler-platz.



this is from an article in the local paper.

the story behind it

this is the only existing photograph of my great-grandfather. when i was a child, i was frightened by this image, by the translucency and fragility of my great-grandfather's face. he died in his early 50s of stomach cancer.
an episode from this man's life informs my art project. my father told me fairly recently that "well, your great-grandfather, my grandfather, was a socialist and the gestapo arrested him in 1934." he had criticized hitler's regime by announcing his political opinion on the hauptmarkt, the town square in nuremberg. soon after, police took him to the station and kept him there until his wife and three daughters pleaded with the officials to release him. they claimed not having a source of income and would starve if their husband and father was being held in jail. he was released shortly thereafter.
this story is my family's connection to nuremberg's town square. had my dad not mentioned it to me, it would have eventually been forgotten. how many stories such as my great-grandfather's, are there? who remembers them? which stories do people remember and which ones would they rather forget? with my project, i want to add to the chronicles of nuremberg by recording stories related to the hauptmarkt, narrated by people in their own voices. the square's history of being a center of trade and commerce spurred my interest - i intend to exchange baked goods for anecdotes...