Feast & Famine Gallery

  We had a field trip to the Paul Robeson Galleries, Rutgers University. One of the artists that spoke out to me was Claudia Claremi, her project called “La Memoria de las Frutas”. She created a 16mm film projection on the forgotten fruits of Puerto Rico, those that do not have a strictly commercial circulation and that have been losing their daily validity. From conversations and interviews addressed directly in the street, she proposed an approach to collect personal anecdotes and impressions that come from the memory of these fruits. The project is presented as an unusual inventory of local fruits that is articulated based on two elements: the image of the hands of people “holding” in a vacuum the shape of their remembered fruit and their voices in the form of testimonial fragments. In Puerto Rico, the fruits with greater distribution are mainly those imported, with the exception of some tropical varieties produced in the country (such as pineapple, papaya, bananas, etc.), so the fruits on the island are each more difficult to find and little by little as they are forgotten. She mentions that most people have a relationship of affection with these fruits and their association, for example, to a tree in the courtyard of the family home, places in the countryside or the city where they grew fruit trees or the pleasure of eating both fruits like sweets that were prepared at home. Trees and fruits are closely linked to moments and people of individual memory. These memories outline a set of hints of the shapes, smells, flavors and textures of fruits, as well as a reflection on the colonial model of economic dependence in the United States, new ways of life, environmental impact and unsustainability development. It should be remembered that in 1898 Puerto Rico was surrendered as a war riot to the US and from 1952 until today the island maintains a profile of a colony under the name of Commonwealth. All these factors participate in the structural causes that have led to this shared disgrace. The project uses absence and forgetting as the focus of the interviews and proposes an individual interpretation of sensory memory using exclusively analogue recording and reconstruction through speech. 16mm film in black and white revealed by hand, digital sound, analog photography and text are the resources that build this project. I felt that her project related to mine because she created a piece in regards to feelings and connotation with one self. You don’t just see an object as itself, there could be more meaning behind it.
              The other artist from the exhibition I picked was Divya Mehra, Modernity at Large (othering the Other), 2015 with the candy hearts. A small shelf holds a glass bowl with candies that say “ENJOY DIVERSITY”. I picked this piece because is accepting things for how they are and that’s the message I’m wanting to express in my project.