earbread

EAR BREAD

The Ear Bread (Pelmeni, the staple Russian food) is the focus of my current research.

This is a re-visit of my previous 'Pelmeni/Meet the Grandparents' work through a lens of obscured colonial history of Russian Empire followed by Soviet repression.

Ural Pelmeni is a joyful personal memory, a home city, a taste of home, a geographical location, a domestic cooking task, a women's community, an oral history, a language, a staple meal and an appropriated food.

Pelmeni/Meet the Grandparents (2019) installation and workshop documentation on my website (predelina.com):

Introduction to an online pelmeni making event earlier this year:

The event was called LIVE FEED: Vlada Predelina cooks Pelmeni.
LIVE FEED was a set of 4 broadcasted events where my art collective 'Eathouse' (consisting of Ulufer Çelik, Merve Kılıçer, Jake Caleb and myself) look at specific dishes we cook, and open up discussions about their histories to find out what draws us to them and how we gather and form a community around them.

I plan to have 3 pelmeni making sessions with women, to listen and to record their conversations:
1. at HKU with a totally new community (maybe using collected plants?)
2. at home with Russian speaking women (in a domestic setting)
3. with women near my studio in Rotterdam (a strong existing community)

From Christina's Li-Ri-Spi-Ri:
"Language is something together. Reinvent it again and again and again."

Eventually I want to visit my home city of Ekaterinburg and then to the neighbouring Udmurt Republic (the motherland of pelmeni)