Alina Turdean
Cultural worker
Food, tools and stories from Banat’s small producers
Dissolving Memory begins with recipes, farming knowledge and stories collected from market vendors, small-scale farmers and cooperative members in Timișoara and Armeniș. It asks how everyday practices—including saving seeds, preserving food, cooking and eating together—can carry agricultural knowledge and relationships into the future.
These findings are compiled in a recipe scrapbook made with vintage paper from Turdean’s personal archive. Three recipes are embroidered onto linen, recalling traditional Romanian kitchen hangings known as ‘peretare’. Alongside this archive, Turdean develops unconventional eating utensils through experiments with clay, flour, hay and grain. Grounded in the concept of homo faber—the human capacity to shape the environment through tools—the objects are engraved with words in regional dialect.
The project culminates in a participatory workshop and dining experience developed with chefs Noemi Hugel and Ioan Bebeselea. A collaboratively created menu is served using the handmade tools. Connecting storytelling, making and communal eating, Dissolving Memory uses food as both medium and message, preserving vulnerable knowledge while opening conversations about the economic structures shaping local agriculture.
