Upcoming
Paige Emery: The Banana Leaf is a Container Technology
Event Details
DATE: September 22, 2024 TIME: 3:30 – 6 pm
LOCATION: Arlington Garden, Pasadena
Registration
TICKET PRICE: Free
During this year’s fall equinox, artist Paige Emery will create a Filipinx Kamayan feast in collaboration with Los Angeles chef Ria Dolly Barbosa, amidst the olive grove of Arlington Garden. For the first in a series co-presented by Active Cultures and The Brick, the program offers a spread of food and flowers served on banana leaves, where we will be seated on the earth and eating by hand—as Emery invites us to gather under the changing season’s sun and experience ecopoetic rituals interspersed throughout the course of the afternoon.
Paige Emery is an artist, herbalist and plant dreamer exploring rituals of remembering the Earth. Her work is invested in interweaving healing arts and critical ecology, ancestral memory and embodied futurities, ecopoetics and socioenvironmental praxis. About this performance, she explains:
The banana leaf is a container technology: that which holds, carries, nourishes, passes on, brings home. Through the ceremonial gathering of Kamayan, the banana leaf holds a scaffolding for ways of relationship. The Filipino practice of eating from banana leaves by hand faded under Spanish and American colonial rule, as it was deemed uncivilized. Through colonization, bananas were also turned into a monoculture market of exploitation, the severing of connection between humans and land, a foundational pillar to dominate humans and land. But the leaf of the banana still carries the memory of communal gathering—a container for remembering how we hold each other in community and how we are held by the Earth that nourishes us. Plants carry ancestral medicine throughout time and space, their form a re-remembering ways of moving with and honoring the cycles of life.
This event will include a display of Emery’s paintings made on banana leaf fibers using oil paint handmade from traditional Filipino medicinal plants and created as talismans for earthly cycles. The program will start promptly at 4 pm.
About the Artists
Ria Dolly Barbosa
