The Kitchen Tables is an installation that occupies two walls facing each other. On the one wall, over 100 picture frames, paintings and chopping boards are hung on the wall. The frames are metal and wood, and were sourced across Italy and South Africa. Some of the frames have paintings in them, of which some are blank, and others are unfinished portraits of family members or historical figures, all of which begin to paint a trans-generational, personal and collective family tree of the colonial blueprint I come from. On the opposite wall, a series of handwritten recipes collected from family and friends are hung up, and below them are kitchen tables and side tables of varying sizes and heights. This installation is activated during the performance Things I Found Nelle Viscere, in which I wrestle with my Western artistic and religious education, and the search for a more decolonial form of sensing and valuing creativity that takes my childhood kitchen table as a starting point.
The place where I most felt aesthesis as an everyday practice of sensing was at the kitchen table. It was a place that centered love and communion offered over food. Communion over the kitchen table, food, creativity, and God, all became synonymous with sacred space for me, epitomised by the hours I spent drawing under the table. This very same table made its way into my performance and exhibition. My kitchen table became one of a number of performative gestures in my performance, Things I Found Nelle Viscere, that got me thinking about the creative and reparative importance of communing with others through labours of love such as preparing and serving them food. I began to collect my favourite recipes from family and friends: Zia Enrica’s Ragu’, Nomfundo’s mom’s Magwinya, Michelle’s Green Beans. I made and served all of these recipes as the closing offering of Things I Found Nelle Viscere, inviting the audience to partake in a moment and a meal together. At the start of the performance, the two sides of the installation were separate entities, but by the end they had intermingled. Through a series of performative gestures – taking picture frames off the wall and placing them on the floor; moulding bread dough into the picture frames and placing them on oven trays; placing the trays of dough onto the kitchen tables alongside the final offering of food at the end of the performance – the normative Western aesthetics of gilded pictures frames and oil paintings had been altered by the aesthesis of the kitchen table and family recipes.
“I am three years old. I have created my own church of sorts. Under the kitchen table of my first home at number 48, 10th Avenue, Orange Grove, lies an abundance of colourful drawings crayoned onto the wood. I spend many happy hours under there, scribbling to my heart’s content. Me and my smallchild aesthesis flow like water.”
Camilla Pontiggia
Extract from Things I Found Nelle Viscere Performance Text
camilla pontiggia 