Pastegh – Fruit Leather and Undulating Storytelling

Veronika Babayan

13 november | 15 – 17h

Get your tickets here!

Join us on Saturday 13 November for a fruit-full workshop led by Veronika Babayan. The workshop involves watching, listening, remembering, and using our hands together. There will be undulating, non-linear storytelling and readings by Veronika as well as cutting, cooking and drawing collectively. Participants will learn how fruit leather is made—also known in the Caucasus and Middle East as pastegh, pestil, lavashak, tklapi, amerdeen. Each person will be given their own small piece of pastegh (fruit leather) on which they can draw/write with edible ink. There is also the option to laser engrave symbols into your piece. If you prefer to laser engrave, we ask you to send a digital file to margarita@w139.nl before the 13th of November. Please read the file requirements below carefully. 

In Veronika Babayan’s installation “Sour Counterfeits”, the maternal Armenian tradition of fruit leather making is seen as 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.

File requirements for laser engraving:

–   Format: JPEG
–   Only black and white (black on white background)
–   Dimensions: Square (1000x1000px)
–   Note: very thin lines or details may become invisible

  Reservation required. Max 10 participants.

Artist bio: 

Veronika Babayan is an artist, writer and educator, who is interested in pedagogies and practices that affect the perpetual production of a national identity. Babayan works with collective memories that offer alternative accounts to those of mainstream histories. Using and animating traditional women’s practices, she emphasizes the role of feminism in undermining hegemonic authority in patriotic memory. Babayan looks for ways in which antagonistic histories such as the Armenian-Turkish interact with each other transnationally by borrowing existing cultural elements, signs and symbols to create new spaces for interterritorial belonging.