Eva Aguila

Food traditions serve as a conduit for preserving cultural legacy. It carries meaningful oral histories within my Mexican heritage, embodying and encapsulating my family origins and ways of life. It also has the potential to evoke feelings of shame stemming from a lack of conformity or assimilation. In Comida a Mano I ask: What is a utensil? Throughout centuries, and in present contemporary living, communities predominantly eat with rice, bread, tortillas, or other forms of grain-like substance to gather food as a utensil. In my upbringing, there was always a large stack of tortillas in the center of the dining table during meals. Utensils were seldomly on the table. This customary practice is a cultural norm within numerous households throughout the world, though it may appear strange within the conventional Western-centric dining etiquette. The unspoken questions about class, appearing as a savage, and being seen as uncivilized come into play. The film delves into these sentiments by interviewing my Dad about his cultural food habits and my cousin who owns and operates a tortilleria in La Paz, Baja California Sur. – Eva Aguila

Eva Aguila is a Mexican American interdisciplinary artist and organizer. As a first generation born in Los Angeles her work currently is centered around oral histories of the Mexican diaspora, specifically her ancestral familial rural Michoacán communities. Aguila works with video, sound, and installation to examine personal histories and the in-betweenness of the Latinx experience. Using research and personal archives her current work is informed by the materiality of memory. Inspired by ephemerality and Indigenous Futurism, she works with time-based media to depict stories and alternative histories to reinterpret cultural portrayals of the diaspora. Aguila is also one of the founders and Board President of Coaxial Arts Foundation, an artist-run non-profit organization dedicated to experimental sound, video, and performance art.

Still from Comida a Mano, 2019, Looping video with sound, 3840 x 2160 pixel, Shot, Edited, and Directed by Eva Aguila, Translation & transcribed by Javier Lopez, Sound Mixing by Chris Candelaria, Color by Jerimiah Morey, Courtesy of the artist