Reflections on the Exhibition Markets, Memories and Mangos

Alexis Parinas is an artist working across moving image, painting, printing and installation. Through explorations of intangible cultural heritage, they seek to archive, imagine, discover, nurture and pass down complex and expansive worlds through their practice. Exploring cultural heritage through food and the rituals surrounding food are central to Alexis’ practice. Community is not just the subject of Alexis’ work; through collaborative workshops and facilitating sessions with volunteers, these processes of co-production and co-authorship are as important as the final works created.

Whilst Parinas devised the project and took part in the gathering of photographs and oral histories, they also used this material to create four vibrant collages that evoke the life, colour and beauty of the markets. Their resulting exhibition – Markets, Memories and Mangos –  brought together this material in a creative reimagining of the archive, with Alexis collaging these photographs to create a series of co-produced images of markets.

Alexis also facilitated a number of artistic workshops covering photography, animation and eco-printing, at venues across Hounslow. These sessions were an opportunity to gather together, share skills, thoughts and memories about the markets, as well as collectively gather materials for the archive. The exhibition also presents video works by Alexis, including a new animation made with students in a Hounslow based school, that poetically explore themes of ritual, transformation, home and communal making.

The following is a reflective text by Alexis, exploring how the Food Markets project has informed their practice and processes, as well as their continued work with CPP Hounslow.

Prior to the project, my arts practice had consisted of exploring food as a central and uniquely enduring component of cultural practices, specifically across diasporic and generational lines. My investigation of food has taken on many different and interlinking forms and ideas: food as a cyclical, ritualistic, and transformative practice; food as community and exchange; the heritage of intangible culture; natural dyeing from food waste; food citizenship, home-making, and belonging; and so on. These explorations were largely domestic, chiefly looking at my own personal food histories as a member of a Filipino family in London, and more specifically as a member of a working-class Ilocano family in Hounslow. As I looked back on the Hounslow shopping routes I’d accompany my parents on as a young kid and how those routes have changed and evolved to present day, I was keen to expand my investigations beyond the domestic, and explore the stories of other people across my local borough to further research if and how the ideas that I had been investigating translate across culture, across generation, and across different socio-political contexts. This project allowed me to do that and more. 

Across the year or so of working on this project, I was awed by the richness of the stories coming from local residents and local traders who spoke with great colour, openness and tenderness about their lives, their connections to Hounslow, their connections to the food markets, the food they eat, and their general thoughts on Hounslow and the local community. It was warming to feel the generosity that the local people had in sharing their stories, and as I reflect on the project I believe all of these exchanges and conversations have added great depth and nuance to my understanding of not only food heritage as a whole but of Hounslow itself. I acquired a mass of knowledge ranging from e.g. the wide variety of different vegetables that are bought and used in different Hounslow households to the changing perspectives of Hounslow High Street as a shopping district and food hub. This process, to me, felt like a mirror vividly reflecting back the many angles of the present in Hounslow.

Among the knowledge I obtained from the project was my understanding of community practice. Primarily I consider my arts practice to be a social practice, collaborating with a multitude of people to create work as well as working with communities and particularly young people in the realm of creative learning. The community engagement that was central to this project was what excited me about the project in the first place, and this community work is what I have learned the most from. Across the seven years that I’ve been working as a creative facilitator, this project was by far the most ambitious project I’ve worked on when factoring in the number of people involved, the length of the project, the outreach, the funding, the vast location, and the general arts engagement among the target communities. As much as I felt that the process reflected back the stories and accounts of the people in Hounslow regarding food and the markets, it also reflected back local views on arts engagement, authorship, CPP Hounslow, arts in relation to the Council, and artmaking in general. Specifically, when recruiting volunteers and especially when trying to engage with traders there were many challenges for several reasons. For example, when speaking to local workers, they were often busy on duty and/or they wanted to defer to their bosses who usually weren’t on site. Sometimes there were language barriers, whether it was their spoken language or more formal arts language. Some didn’t understand or could not visualise what the outcomes would be. Most people didn’t know what CPP Hounslow was. Some noted distrust for Hounslow Council, which was often a primary association with the Libraries and arts engagement. For some, it was time constraints. It was particularly notable to me that many people didn’t understand why documenting their lives and livelihoods was important, let alone why it was important for them to be involved. Similarly, many people viewed artmaking as something solely for [their] children. (Perhaps notably and relatedly, the least challenging aspect of the project in my view was the school engagement; I proposed a series of workshops with St Mark’s Catholic School in Hounslow, which was immediately and excitedly accommodated, and through which had numerous exciting conversations, exchanges and artistic outcomes.)

A lot of this misunderstanding admittedly lay at our feet, as our strategy and communication on especially the earliest recruitment drives weren’t as solid or methodical as they could have been but we took a lot of those learnings and persisted with the outreach. I believe the biggest factor in driving successful engagement among the traders was our wonderful Volunteer Co-ordinator, Mar, who patiently returned and returned and returned to many markets and specialist food stores in Hounslow, building up earnest rapport and trust with the workers, who eventually became engaged with the project. As I reflect upon the legacy of the project, I am really hopeful about how this project could be used as a learning tool for future community projects. I’m very proud that the learnings have already been adopted for the brilliant ‘High Street Stories’ project with Hannah Lim, assisted again by Mar, whose ground knowledge and presence I’m sure were invaluable. 

In my earliest proposal of this project to CPP Hounslow, I posited that the markets are “a place that effectively acts as a portal to many outcomes and many possibilities; the ingredients lead to a multitude of formed recipes and dishes or homemade herbal medicines/remedies, each embedded with their own unique histories and lineages, and each then another link in an ongoing chain of shared possibilities and shared rituals of care.” Something I hadn’t given much credence to was the possibility of the marketplace – and more widely the High Street and every single pocket of Hounslow – being a site for art and art making too. This is an avenue of thought and possibility that the project has opened up my eyes to. As these projects hopefully continue to unfold, and as the art and the people like Mar, the volunteers, the artists, and CPP Hounslow become more physically embedded across Hounslow, I envision Hounslow not only as a food hub but as a hub for creativity. As trust with CPP Hounslow (as well as CEZ and other creative and cultural organisations/ initiatives) grows, arts engagement inevitably grows, as do the perspectives on who art is for and by. I’ve been fortunate enough to really become part of such a vibrant community through this project, and I’m excited and optimistic about how others in Hounslow can find and foster community through local arts engagement. Ultimately, I believe the project showed that heritage isn’t just the cultural institutions, it’s the high street, it’s the markets, and most importantly it’s the people; and, as such, it should be the people, our stories, our perspectives, and our community that should be preserved, fostered and celebrated.