My art project is a collaboration with my hometown Nuremberg in Germany. The project’s progress is being recorded as audio files, super 8, and in video format, as well as in photographs. I have been baking gingerbread and shaping it to resample cobblestones, the preferred material to pave public areas in the old part of Nuremberg since the Middle Ages. The recipe for the gingerbread comes from my mother – Nuremberg is famous for its gingerbread and a number of its inhabitants pride themselves upon their own variations of the sweet treat. According to this tradition, I have substituted traditional ingredients of my mom’s recipe with ingredients indigenous to America, which is where I live now. I re-named the baked cookies chilibread, referring to its new main ingredient, chili peppers. I plan to send my revised recipe and a number of ingredients not available in Germany, to my mother in Nuremberg; she is my principal collaborator. My family’s history contains memories of super 8 footage exchanged between family members living in California and Germany. I have recorded super 8 films of myself making chilibread in Beacon, NY, and intend to send this footage to collaborators in Germany. I see this project to be continued and extended after the initial transaction of exchange, which is my goal for this year.
Once I’m back in Germany in March and again in July next year, I will adhere the baked cobblestones together to form a large piece of chilibread ‘pavement’, which I invite people to share with me while sharing anecdotes relating to Nuremberg’s main square, the Hauptmarkt. Chilibread, following the purpose of its originator, gingerbread, is intended to be stored for many months. The stored sweet treat will serve as the “currency” to exchange episodes, which will be stored mainly as audio recordings to create an archive. I also intent to mix fragrant spices used in recipes for traditional gingerbread and spread them over an area on the Hauptmarkt in Nuremberg to seep into gaps between the real cobblestones and simultaneously be distributed through people’s footsteps. Thus it will leave olfactory as well as visible traces, which can be perceived throughout the old town. I want to encourage people to remember and communicate and to experience a familiar location in a new context, emphasizing the square’s constantly changing history and purpose.
The title Gewürzgeflüster is an invented German term, which refers to the significant role of the various spices in my project, but it also hints on the act of people communicating with each other by whispering. At this point, fairy tales, narrated in low voices to increase anticipation in the listeners, are creeping into the essence of my project. I envision the fable of Hänsel und Gretel, two children lost in a forest, seduced by a witch who lives in a gingerbread house, to create a metaphor for and to point to, the sinister aspects of Nuremberg’s history.