Making Pancakes: Intergenerational Cooking and Remediating the Archive

What is it about?

Making Pancakes is one of the twelve projects included in my four-channel video installation, Remediating Mama Pina’s Cookbook, which is based on a handwritten family cookbook that belonged to three generations of women in my family. The installation investigates the family cookbook as an archive of sorts. In the project, I examine the cookbook as a medium through which gender roles, social status, memories, and household economies are recorded and passed on from generation to generation. My aim is to revive this cookbook. To reactivate it, I invited several friends to respond to one of the recipes in Mamá Pina’s cookbook in any media format of their choice. The responses included digital images, audio recordings, videos, documentation of family gatherings, and conversations that reactivated the handwritten record while unpacking its absences and creating new experiences that remediate the recipes. In Making Pancakes, Alejandra Bronfman cooks the recipe, “Cakes para el Desayuno,” that was handwritten by my great grandmother, Mamá Pina. Along with her mother, Marisa Bronfman, her daughters Maia and Nina Dawson, and her partner Alec Dawson as the videographer, Bronfman sets up a family gathering where three different generations make pancakes together and, in both English and Spanish, share their particular skills and perspectives on cooking.

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