Answering the Call, A House of Memory
Cast of Characters: Chef Gerard "Gee" Mitchell (co-producer)
Hailey Wilkins, TVS Architect (co-producer)
Bernard McCoy, Founder of Atlanta Design Festival
Created for the Atlanta Design Festival, A House of Memory was a multisensory DesignStation that transformed the TVS studio in Atlanta, into an immersive, temporary domestic environment exploring food, memory, ritual, and the spaces that hold us.
Through music, furniture staging, ingredient storytelling and small controlled tastings, and a participatory community archive, Chef Gee and company invited guests to experience how family recipes and culinary traditions become living forms of design. With each dish, the chefs honored their lineages and the lasting influence on their relationships to nourishment, hospitality, and community.
The Ask
Fresh off the Atlanta Food and Wine Festival, Chef Gee hosted an intimate night to fry chicken and eat with friends. At this chicken fry, Gee informed me he was involved with another pop-up; this time for the Atlanta Design Festival and he floated the idea of bringing me onto the team for some archival work. The night continued with mouthwatering crunch and titillating conversation as I sat intrigued by the idea of simply being included.
The next Sunday I get a text.
"Can you hop on a call tomorrow at 11:30am?"
"Sure"
That call was the formal ask and proposal to join the team as the Archivist for A House of Memory. What does an archivist do? For this project, I wore a quite few hats. Firstly, I was responsible for sourcing family photos and picture frames. This was easy enough as I have an expansive collection of physical and digital photos, spanning as far back as the Antebellum period. And I work in the frame shop of a craft store. Early on, we discussed creating a booklet that summarized the experience; so I drafted discussion questions to stimulate a conversation around food traditions, culture, family, and legacy. I also designed all of the physical assets- the recipe cards, interpretation cards, and discussion house cards. And I'm overseeing the digital archive; encouraging participants to add their own photos, recipes, and memories; to grow the experience.
Preparation
The week that followed was an absolute whirlwind. The day after I came on, I met the rest of the team at Bernard McCoy's studio- where we convened to talk art and possible sponsorship opportunities for our installation. Bernard looked each of us in the eye and asked earnestly how we planned to elevate our individual disciplines for this event. It was the first time that I was asked to take my collector's hobby seriously as a creative discipline. I immediately locked in.
I left the studio visit buzzing with ideas about how to elevate Bread, Gerard's cultural house and also debut myself as a graphic designer and printmaker in the Atlanta market.
Let's Get This Bread, I Guess
Gee and I have been ideating for awhile about creating a zine to highlight some of his recipes. He has a rolodex of cultural fusion dishes from the "Mississippi Masala" and "Chattahoochee Curry"; and I've been itching to drop another mini-cookbook since Monday Dinner vol 2. This seemed like the perfect excuse.
The Let's Get This Bread, I Guess photo-zine is a collaboration between Sydtopia and Bread, a contemporary culture house that explores connection thru culinary, design, and human experiences.
This was one of the easiest collaborations I've done. Bread has a plethora of creative assets that I was able to reimagine for this photo-book.
The photography is contributed by Shakur Harrison and Kody Cunningham, from one of Chef Gee's curated small plate tastings. The ingredient breakdown on page 5 comes from Chef Gee's own description of the Mississippi Masala. Even the collage on page 4 was inspired by the movie poster of the dish's namesake; a motif that Chef Gee used often in his promotions on Instagram.
This photo-book also serves as the proof of concept for the larger zine that's to come from the recipes, discussion, and other ephemera collected during A House of Memory.
The Art of Printing
Designing is the easy part. I still needed to print of all the assets for the installation, and secure a limited run of the Let's Get This Bread, I Guess and It's Monday Dinner vol. 2 zines for display. Printing, like all creative disciplines, comes with it's own testing and growing pains; and the production for this show was no exception. I printed everything on 4.5in x 6.5in cardstock- a decision I quickly regretted. The small cards got thrown around in the printer and the designs kept coming out crooked. I had trouble correctly sizing the margins on the house cards, and figuring out double sided printing of the interpretation cards.
When it came to securing high quality prints in a quick turnaround and even tighter budget, I immediately reached out to the West End Print Shop. The owner, Ralph, is a family friend and I've been hanging out and printing there since I was a little girl. Ralph's come through for me multiple times over the years- printing everything from personal greeting cards to the Equitable Growth and Inclusion Strategic Plan for the Partnership for Southern Equity. I called Uncle Ralph and he pushed my prints through. I was relieved until I got an email at 4am.. he didn't understand my printing instructions, and requested that I showed up at the store first thing in the morning to assist.
Early the next morning, I packed up my photos, frames, and my printer and headed off to the print shop. I was happy I got there when I did, waiting in line I overheard another customer talking about how the line is often wrapped around the building. Being there so early, I was able to walk the associate through my complicated instructions and was out the door and on the way to Gee's to finish printing the rest of the assets.
Printing and assembling was nearly seamless once I set up shop at Gee's. We were able to workshop last minute design ideas; and with the kinks worked out- printing the assets became almost machine-like.
Making the Memories
Setting up at TVS was an absolute dream. Our co-producer, Hailey Wilkins, works at TVS and was able to secure the design studio for our installation. Also, as part of our pop-up, a TVS architect led a guided tour of archival sketches from one of the founders, Tom Ventulett. While I finished printing the discussion cards, my team staged the zines, recipe, and interpretation cards, and family photos (shout out Dee Sangoyele and Jordan Mitchell)!
Stefan Ringer set the vibe spinning vinyls, and ArtPopSips offered mocktails. Ryan Stegal and Sedio Stuart worked with Chef Gee to curate an intimate menu that paid homage to their lineages in unique ways. Chef Gee prepared a oyster pate with escovitch crustini. Chef Ryan made black eyed peas pate on a cornbread cracker, an homage to his grandparents who loved black eyed peas and cornbread. Chef Sedio's grandmother wasn't the cooking kind, instead she enjoyed nice clothes and eating Indian food with her family; so Sedio made panipuri.
I ran the archive station and facilitated the discussions around the relationship between food, legacy, and culture. We collected recipes and shared family photos. And for a night, we turned the TVS Design Studio into a Home.
What's Next?
The Archive
The House of Memory installation will live on in two formats- a digital archive and a zine that encapsulates the experience. The zine features collected recipes, excerpts of the discussions, photos from the event, and interviews with the chefs about the inspiration behind their dishes.
More information about the digital archive can be found at www.sydtopia.net/house-of-memory.
Be on the lookout for more information about pre-ordering a copy of the House of Memory booklet.
Comments