Art workshop and dining experience. Book your spot and join us!
Come In and Take a Seat
I like to think that the experience of migrating—sometimes solitary and a bit painful—needs to be nurtured with care.
10 years ago I arrived in this land as a queer Latina migrant, and I’ve always felt an enormous need to belong, to build a home, a refuge. Not just for myself, but also for those who feel in the same particular way that I do.
In Colombia, the country where I come from, the home has always been fundamental as a center of rest, as a space for celebration and shelter. The home as a mother who strokes our head and feeds us at the table while we unburden and rebuild ourselves. There, around the table, is where I learned to name the everyday as sacred.
Pen and Fork was born from that affective memory: that of building a cozy, simple, comfortable, warm, homey place. A space where migrant bodies and peripheral subjectivities—solitary and with a suitcase full of anxieties like mine—could find comfort in the warmth of a table full of creativity and nourishment. A sanctuary like the tables of my aunt Zoraida, my grandmother Targelia, and now my mother’s table were for me. Accompanied by coffee and freshly baked bread, hojaldras and arepas grilled by their hands, where I shed so many tears and laughs.
Those tables were also points of intergenerational and community gathering. Spaces where affections were woven with known and unknown people, simply for the pleasure and joy of sharing.
That table where every month my aunt would gather her friends—”the witches”—to paint cakes, sew, create beautiful decorations and eat! Where I took my first painting lessons and threaded my first needles. Those were my first creative gestures, and also my first forms of belonging.
That feeling that I cannot forget is what I try to reconstruct here and want to share with you.
A place to question ourselves, to respond by drawing, to cut, draw, write and inhabit the paper with our hands. For feelings to find rest. Where the creative act is not mediated by productivity, but by the desire to connect, to liberate and to rewrite the path back to ourselves, to our home.
There have been several editions of To Eat to Draw and Pen and Fork. In each one I feel that something is changing and has been transforming. I like to think that art—when rooted in the everyday and the collective—can heal and transform, even if just for a little while, the sorrows we carry.
For this first edition of the year I invited my dear Mar again, with whom we have created quite a few things together. Great chef, ceramist and artist, with whom we share the desire to honor our family traditions and make visible the political and cultural value of our Latin American tables.
Sharing the table, in this context, is also an act of resistance, memory, and collective creation.
*Only available in Naarm/Melbourne.