Record, 2018 – A project containing two handwritten accordion books, The Lesson and Historiography, following my maternal grandmother‘s cursive script, as well as letters and photographs, pertaining to the themes of family (and by extension recipes), memory, and personal archives. The photos don’t really capture the scale of these books but my aim was to add so many pages that the idea of trying to hold on to a memory becomes impossible over time. The Lesson contains both the transcription of my maternal grandmother’s Spanish recipes, my English translation of them (using Google Translate), and my attempts to write like her. Historiography contains a collaged text combining some of the terminology from my grandmother’s cookbook and parts of a letter I was writing to my late paternal grandmother after reading about her in someone’s autobiography unexpectedly.
Shazia Ahmad 