BAKE

Performance; 2023 – Ongoing

Inspired by Bill Drummond’s food-based performance projects—including Hot Cross Borders, The Soup Line (2004), and the Tea Rooms component of The 25 Paintings (2022)¹—this project positions baking as performance and food preparation as composition. From 2023 onward, individuals could request I make them scones and jam for a gathering, by text message or email and with a month’s notice. This scheduling would be at no cost to the recipient, creating gatherings centered on oral storytelling and embodied cultural transmission in a way that decentivizes advertisement and capitalist economies with I, the facilitator, absorbing the cost.

Drawing from Walter Benjamin’s theorization of aura and Walter J. Ong’s analysis of orality, BAKE operates as a deliberate inversion of mechanical reproduction’s logic. Where Benjamin identifies the contemporary “desire to bring things closer spatially and humanly”² through reproduction and circulation, BAKE insists on actual proximity—physical presence that cannot be mediated, substituted, or scaled. The work produces what Benjamin calls “aura” by refusing exhibition value: gatherings are not publicized, documented for circulation, or transformed into consumable artifacts. Like the cave paintings meant “for the spirits” rather than viewers, or the cult objects that “remain hidden,” BAKE prioritizes ritual presence over exhibition.

This resistance to textualization connects to Ong’s observations about what becomes lost when experience is centralized to text. The project foregrounds orature—cultural memory formed through face-to-face interaction—as a decolonial practice that refuses the extractive logic of documentation.³ Just as the recording of Old Irish oral traditions by monastic scribes and later translators like Lady Gregory represented ideological transformation through textualization⁴, BAKE insists on modes of cultural transmission that cannot be captured, archived, or commodified through techno-literacy or its commodified documentation a la posts on social media or distributed in such a way for consumption.

The work functions as critical making: the process itself—sourcing ingredients, coordinating requests, facilitating embodied exchange—becomes a means of questioning dominant narratives about participation, value, and cultural production. BAKE inverts this relationship entirely, transforming embodied labor into temporary social formations that resist both exact reproduction and textual capture.

Managed all aspects of production and coordination, with scones and jam distributed exclusively during in-person events.

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