Fiz Pra Você (2024)

Fiz Pra Você (2024)

Fiz pra Você examines how food shapes us through memory, language, migration, and the rituals repeated around the family table. The installation began with handwritten recipes from my own family and later expanded to include recipes shared by friends from different cultural backgrounds. Written in several languages, they carry more than ingredients and instructions. They preserve gestures of care, traces of home, and the desire to remain connected to those who came before us.

The Portuguese title, Fiz pra Você, means “I made it for you.” It is an intimate expression of affection, but it may also carry the expectation that the offering should be accepted. In my upbringing, food was deeply connected to love and belonging, yet the table was also a place where guilt, discipline, religion, and obligation could be transmitted.

Within the installation, recipes occupy vintage wooden birdcages in different states. Some remain confined, others pass through the bars, and a few hang freely, suspended between preservation and release. The cages suggest how traditions can offer shelter and continuity while also becoming forms of emotional confinement.

A long red ribbon moves through the installation, carrying phrases from my upbringing handwritten in Portuguese. The words remain physically inscribed in the fabric, like generational marks passed quietly from one body to another.

Fiz pra Você honors food as a vessel of culture, affection, and collective memory without separating nourishment from its more complicated inheritances. What forms us includes not only what was cooked and shared, but also the voices, expectations, and silences carried alongside each meal.