ELEONORA EDREVA
Projects:
re-
inearth/unearth
At each doorway,
Yelling Pillow
Cradle to grave
re-patterning slowly
The sound that surrounds
Once upon a future
A Garden...
Windy Season
Eau Doom
Video Work
Writing
About
Substack
Video Work
Cooking with grandma demonstrates how a severance from ancestral language is also a severance from familial and cultural foods. The video moves between English and Bulgarian using Google Translate, translating a published Bulgarian cookbook written in English and a family recipe-book handwritten by my grandma. Since I can only read typed Bulgarian, this work asks what it means for my cells to contain the memories of generations of family cooking, but for me to need (faulty) technological mediation in reading their recipes.
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Double arrow is a video piece made during the Tallgrass Prairie Residency in the Flint Hills of Kansas. The piece takes its shape from a traditional quilt pattern in the region titled Double Arrows. The piece reflects my sensorial experience of getting to know that landscape, and the different scales of time that were reflected in the local landscape and the human interventions upon it.
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Family Jewels (2018) is a magnification of genderless beings in the world and in our home, and an attempt to family-build through tenderly nourishing these lifeforms just as they build up and nourish us. The work is also a response to “biological” arguments for the existence of the gender binary and of sexual reproduction as family building requirements - as a couple who exists outside of those ideas, we seek to show, celebrate, and cradle life forms that wriggle out of boxed-in conceptions of gender and reproduction. Fermentation became a parenting practice for us; caring for these creatures calls for love, regularity, and careful observation. Maintaining healthy ferments is daily work and we have different relationships and responsibilities with each one of our jars - watching our kefir grains grow with each new batch, saving a little bit of kvass to make the next batch ferment quicker - even different jars of the same type of ferment behave differently and reveal their personalities to us little by little. Parenting is essentially just an investment in the future and ferments are the future we're invested in, a future of embracing and caring for the microscopic organisms that make up our bodies and our world and folding them tenderly into our concepts of family.
Family Jewels is a collaboration with Leo Williams.
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