Veronika Babayan

In collaboration with the Brooderhood initiative, this series of gatherings/workshops explores the ways in which traditions around food preservation are passed on and transformed over generations. While delving into the tradition of fruit-leather-making, we learn how we can adapt traditional recipes to our contemporary needs. This program encourages collective learning through sharing experiences, methods and recipes that tackle food waste.

On June 23 2023, Eathouse hosted their fourth and final Tongue Twisting Dinner of the current series. For the session they brought together voices from Iran, Lebanon, Armenia and Turkey. Diana Al-Halabi’s research brings in different histories of the region. Veronika Babayan transfers women’s generational knowledge through her artistic practice that deals with antagonistic histories. Whereas JINA Collective is a feminist activist group that emerged from the Woman, Life, Freedom movement.

An evening organised on international Women's Day, during which the women of the community house BOTU came together to exchange intergenerational knowledge on the tradition of fruit leather making, to write letters from the future to the past, and to celebrate together in solidarity through cooking and sharing food together.

‘Warmly’ is a group exhibition aiming to spotlight the crux between art and craftsmanship, knowledge and know-how, the intuitive and the analytical, material and conceptual. The imaginaries of painting, textile, organic matter, and cooking are brought together as the core of this presentation by three female artists who share the visceral energy to dig deeper into their research process and the political dimension of making: Veronika Babayan, Natacha Mankowski, and Natsuko Uchino.

Motherland in its various interpretations - such as Mother Earth, Mother Goddess, motherhood, Mother Heroine, homeland, patriotism, citizenship and nationality - is the theme of the artistic rethinking and reflections in the joint international project of Veronika Babayan, Olga Ganzha, Tatevik Ghukasyan and masharu.

This workshop involved watching, listening, remembering, cutting, cooking and learning how to make fruit leather—also known in the SWANA region as pastegh, pestil, lavashak, tklapi, amerdeen.

The work of the mother is historically kept out of the public sphere, but that doesn’t mean that the Mother[hood] is only as large as her house. What a mother makes becomes economy, what a mother teaches becomes knowledge and what a mother touches becomes society.

Sour Counterfeits is a mobile forgery lab, where fruit leather documents are produced. In this multiphase project, Armenian women's generational knowledge of fruit leather making is transformed into a mnemonic device for cultural preservation. “Sour Counterfeits” pulls from a larger collective memory, serving as a vessel through which deracinated testimonials of trans-generational trauma circulate beyond territory, language and citizenship.

Taking the form of a passport, this meta-autobiographical memoir, is an internalised investigation of the concept of collective trauma and motherhood. How can we allow future generations to devictimise the transnational identity and to create a new, fluid mechanism of belonging? How does maternal care as a mnemonic device affect a child’s identity formation?