Presentations :

May 1 2025 : PEACH (Promoting Education and Community Health), Jane-Finch Toronto.

Supported through an Ignite seed funding from the Toronto Arts Council.

Chocolate and Chick Peas : augmented food stories for the diasporic communities of Jane-Finch, Toronto was a new project proposed in collaboration with community partners around issues of food insecurity, access and exploring first-hand conceptual and practical strategies for advocacy through the medium of food and shared culinary experiences. Our project while having a multimedia output, fundamentally aimed to provide a forum for such conversations and initiate a long term digital archive that will both activate the community kitchen at PEACH, as well as target youth and young-at-heart to be participants and workshop these technologies together. Our objectives at the onset were to

1. Share important cultural and intergenerational memories through oral narratives and initiate a long term digital archive
2. Activate the community kitchen through food demonstrations and community/relational development over food between seniors and youth.
3. Create a unique visual presentation of animation and filmed documentation with the kitchen as stage, and the dining table as screen. 
4. Use these modes of engagement as a forum for conversations around food advocacy and community development.

Through a close working relationship with the York team and Peach community members, the project team decided to focus on the seniors group (that meets for 2h every Wednesday) as opposed to the food bank attendees because of the consistency in the former.  We held discussions around healthy living through food and tai chi classes led by community activators from PEACH.  We had 3 main participants in this pilot to collect food stories and recipes and filmed food demonstrations with them (with recipes from Jamaica, Djibouti and Barbados).  In these, youth from PEACH were involved in helping prep in the kitchen, and we developed an animation from these that culminated in a projection mapped dining experience at PEACH.  In this sense, all 4 objectives were reached, but there is much room for further development.