Frank Bready Trejo, artist
A conversation about his spiritual upbringing in a town full of Catholic witches, incorporating indigenous thought into daily life and the importance of giving food.
this interview has been condensed for length and fluidity.
When Frank Bready Trejo turned nine years old, his father told him it was time that he started taking care of himself. This was, afterall, what his father had done. At nine, having grown tired of living with an abusive step-father, he got on a bus and headed to his aunt’s house where he stayed and worked until he was old enough to live in his own place.
“It’s so funny to me the image of this little nine year old boy being like, ‘No, I’m done with this’ and packing his bags and moving out,” Trejo laughs. “My father expected the same from me. For me to be independent. I knew I wanted to be an artist but he said he wasn’t going to send me to an art school. I said, ‘ok’, but in my head I knew I was going to figure out a way. So I saved my allowances and started paying for my art classes and ended up enrolling in a high school for the visual arts.”
Straight out of high school, Trejo started organizing art performances in his hometown of Yaracuy, Venezuela, a mystical region with strong indigenous traditions that the rest of the country considers a ‘place you pass through to get somewhere else.’
“At the time, the government was shutting down galleries and cutting the budgets for museums. A friend and I got together and we decided that if there isn’t any space for us we were going to create a space,” Trejo explains. “We wanted Yaracuy to become a reference in the country and the continent for art. We started inviting performance artists, always prioritizing artists with strong bodies of work that weren’t getting exposure from other institutions, and organizing events with artists from around the Americas. They’d crash at my place and fall in love with my mom’s cooking and all become friends with my dad. It was about building a community.”
In Buenos Aires, he reunited with friend and performance artist Yarinés Suárez (who I interviewed for this fanzine in October) and began Casa Museo, an art space and kitchen laboratory run out of the apartment that they share. They are in the middle of organizing an event to cook hallacas, a ritualistic pre-Colombian dish served during the Christmas holidays. Together with cooks Gloría del Fogón, José Eizaga and Ivanova Hidalgo, who will each be cooking their own family recipes, the goal is to feed 200 Venezuelans working for predatory and precarious delivery apps.
Se vende America / America for sale; Colombia, 2014
Your work deals a lot with your relationship to food and your homeland, can you tell me about where you were born and what foods you remember from your childhood?
I was born in Yaracuy which is in the Central West of Venezuela. I remember my mother used to give me the heart of the arepa. The arepa has a shell, the toasted part, so you open it and what’s left inside is the soft dough, which is called the heart of the arepa. You give that to kids. You scrape all that out, set the shell aside. I’m talking about kids that still can’t chew. My mom would mix that with butter and cheese.
Wait, you are talking about food from when you were an infant. You remember that?
Yeah. I have really strong memories about that. I also remember the arepa soup, which is a milk based soup. You slowly heat up the milk and add butter and salt, and tear apart pieces of arepa to add to the finished soup. It’s not really a typical dish. I remember my mom made it for me a lot. Her aunt used to make the same soup but with peppermint. I don’t know if other people in Yaracuy made that but my mom made that a lot. I ate a lot of arepas with whey. My mom didn’t really like to cook. My parents were separated and I grew up with my mom but when they got back together and we moved in with my dad my mom started cooking the foods my dad liked. There was always a lot of food in the house because someone always showed up. Always. I grew up with that idea. When someone comes over, I have to offer them food. I love that. That is really important to me. I was always in the kitchen with my mom. I always helped with whatever she was making. Black beans, white beans, red beans, peas and rice, fried plantain. Always what my dad felt like eating.
What did your dad grow up eating?
My dad was raised by a man from Catalan. So there were certain dishes he really liked. He taught me how to make a tortilla. Usually with just potato but sometimes we’d add spinach or beet. But the kitchen was my mother’s territory and nobody elses. Although she had us make our own breakfast and dinner. She wasn’t interested in cooking everything so she was just like, I’ll make lunch and that’s it. So I learned from a very young age how to cook. When I started eating more she stopped that. I’ll make dinner now because you are using up all my flour! Ok, mom. She let me help but she gave the orders. At home, my relationship with the kitchen and my mom was we were always bickering. My mom likes to control everything. She has the same dynamic with my little brother now. He is four and is always by my mother’s side and especially in the kitchen. It’s nuts that she raised an only child for 23 years and now she is raising another boy as if he were an only child. My mom controls everything, the house, what we all eat, what everyone is doing, what everyone isn’t doing. She has eyes everywhere. I always let my father believe that he was in control but it was really my mom. When I was nine years old my dad told me that I was on my own. I needed to start making decisions for myself. My father had a stepdad that hit his mom, him, his brother, and so when he was nine he hopped on a bus and went to his aunt’s house. He stayed there and always worked. So when I turned nine he sort of expected the same from me. I knew I wanted to be an artist, he said he wasn’t going to send me to art school. So I saved my allowance and started taking art classes. That was the dynamic with my parents, freedom and control. It was a very strange upbringing.
Tell me more about Yaracuy. You have told me before that it is a pretty idiosyncratic place within the country and it plays a big role in your work as an artist.
When I was seven years old I started going to a shaman who is also my godmother. A local saint named Doctor José Gregorio Hernández speaks through her. He is a saint that I have a really intimate relationship with. Every Saturday, we would go and speak with Doctor Hernández. He’d be like, ok you have a problem with your head, or you have an issue with your ovaries, whatever it is, and he’d prescribe a tea with medicinal leaves. And so you have this saint who is Catholic who is speaking through a spiritual guide that the church doesn’t recognize who sends you off to practice natural medicine. En Yaracuy, nature, shamanism and catholicism all co-exist with one another. You go to someone's house and they probably have the Virgin Mary and Jesus Christ on the wall but they also have a small room dedicated to their local saint. Maybe Maria Lionza, who is the Queen of Venezuela. She is our Mother Earth. That idiosyncrasy is really natural for us and it is a part of our daily lives which isn’t the same all over the country. We have this sort of language that is psychomagical that lives with us. Say that you are thinking about something like, This person is stealing money from me, and something falls over. Automatically we think that thought is real and that that person is stealing money from us because something happened that accompanied that thought. Those are manifestations. When I started studying all this, I realized that those rituals, those mythologies, indigenous thought, they aren’t imaginary. In Western culture, religion is more pragmatic, it’s about a social relationship, and for us religion is how we relate to the world around us and our daily lives. These rituals are real because we live them and we relate our lives to them. That is part of psychomagic and the life of the shamans.
Tell me about how that understanding of indigenous thought, ritual, place and food all combine in your work as a performance artist.
My work is about a reconfiguration of my culture, my nature, me as a student of indigenous thought, and how all of that can have a space in my day to day, in this day. There was a festival in Colombia that I participated in and the theme was We Are Matter. I made this association with corn, us as corn, utilizing this indigenous understanding of nature and everything that corn represents. This was in 2014 when the problems in Venezuela were really beginning to happen. I boiled a sack of corn and sold it. In Venezuela it’s common to eat corn like that but not in Colombia so it became this sort of spectacle. I made a menu out of all the countries in America. Venezuela, 100 pesos. Cuba, 100 pesos. United States, 4500 pesos. It was this fictitious menu where countries that were better off economically were more expensive, countries that weren’t were cheaper. I wanted people to see that we are all the same. Everyone was buying the same corn but they were divided by these imaginary borders that are constructed politically and that force us to consume ourselves. And I wrote an essay that was about the ecological crisis not being something that was external to us. The crisis has to do with a separation of body and mind and this anthropocentric idea of subject and object. This is a psychological problem that allows us to behave the way we do. We treat nature like an object. We are nature. That is a problem of the mind. The idea was to see ourselves as nature, as corn.
And that idea of incorporating art into daily life is the basis of Casa Museo, your home and art space where you work and live with Yarinés Suárez. How did that all come together?
I know Yarinés from Venezuela. She kept telling me to come here. I was in Colombia for a little while but it wasn’t a good place for me. I couldn’t find work. I couldn’t find my own place. I was always crashing on someone’s floor. I traveled to Peru and got a job at a restaurant where I worked thirteen hours, seven days a week. When I decided I’d come here, I worked three months, saved everything and went to Venezuela because I knew once I was here, it would be really difficult to go home. So I went home, spent everything to visit my family, give gifts and visit all the places that are sacred to me. I went back to Peru, worked another three months and then hopped on a bus and spent two days traveling to Buenos Aires. Yarinés was living in a house and the guy that was in charge was really cool and let me stay in an empty room for free while I looked for work which was really hard. I got a job as a dishwasher eventually. The owner of that house didn’t want to renew the contract so before we moved out we threw a party and invited a bunch of performance artists to come. We just left the door open and people started showing up. And this Venezuelan artist named Clemencia Labin, she organizes this festival called la Velada de Santa Lucía in Maracaibo which turns regular houses into art spaces for a week. She happened to be on vacation in Buenos Aires. She came and once she found out that Yarinés and I have the same birthday she was like, this is all destiny, this is mystic, and gave us her blessing and that turned into Casa Museo. We found this apartment and the idea has been to create connections and community. Yarinés’ work is all about food and memory and processes of making food and so we decided to turn this into a cooking laboratory.
You started this project right before the pandemic happened. How has that affected the project?
When the pandemic started, I got moved to the restaurant downtown. I ride my bike to work and noticed a lot of people living in the street. The restaurant wasn’t selling food so they would send it home with us and I started giving food to the people on the street. I felt a necessity within me to do that. I felt this urgency to give food. I have always done my shopping at the weekend market and I am a very faithful customer. Once I find a place, I won’t buy from anyone else. Yarinés is different. She likes to shop around. So we were standing next to the stand where I always buy my fruit and vegetables, kind of arguing, and I was like I buy vegetables here at this stand. I’m not shopping around. I don’t care if it’s cheaper somewhere else. The vegetable vendor had already noticed me and overheard our conversation, which is really funny now that Yarinés was arguing with me to shop somewhere else. Anyway she started giving us food. One day she asked me, Do you like smoothies? Yah. And so she handed me a bag with four kilos of bananas and told me to take it because otherwise ‘it would go to waste.’ What?! When the pandemic happened, I stopped shopping at the market because I didn’t have the money to shop there. Yarinés kept going and the woman would always ask for me. Over and over. So one day I went and I explained to her that my salary had been cut and I didn’t have money to buy at the market anymore. So she says, come back at 2pm. Now every Saturday I go at 2pm and she gives us crates of fruits and vegetables. We started giving some of that food to friends and cooked her a plate with food she gave us to show her our gratitude. That is how I know to give thanks. Giving food. And it is strange because this always happens to me. Wherever I go, I find some abuelita that treats me like her own son or grandson and makes sure that I have food to eat. When that happened here in Argentina, I finally felt like I was home. When we were talking about giving food to people, we decided that we would do an event to give food to the people who work delivery for the food apps. We have a friend that does that and he has been protesting against the precariousness of those jobs. We wanted to work with them because first of all, it is a very precarious job. And secondly, when you are an immigrant, it is one of the first jobs available and that is why most of them are Venezuelan. I saw the same thing in Colombia. It’s inevitable that we get stuck with that work with so many people emigrating. So that is why we focused on that. This weighs down on us. We want to give a gift. An offering. Jesus Christ they work so hard every single day. Migrating is really hard. They are in these jobs and, you know, delivery isn’t a profession. Someone might be a doctor. We have a friend who is an audiovisual producer. There must be an agronomist. A chemist. It must be frustrating to have to take that job. We want to do something to give them strength and so we chose to make hallacas because of what the hallaca represents to us. That is the work of art. The experience of giving that dish. And I know how it will feel. That intensity. Someone gave to me and I know what that feels like and I want them to feel that too.
What is the significance of the ritual around the hallaca?
The hallaca is a traditional dish from Venezuela that we make in December for the holidays when the family all gets together. It’s incredibly important. At my house we didn’t really celebrate holidays but we participated in that tradition. The same way that I find abuelitas, my dad did too. So I have all these nanas. We would go to all their houses and at every single one you eat a hallaca. It doesn’t matter how many you’ve already eaten that day, you sit down and eat a hallaca. So to gift a hallaca is to gift someone their family, their home, their town. When you think about the hallaca, you think about your family. It isn’t about the hallaca, it is about the sensation of feeling like you are with your family. For us, or for anyone who migrates, celebrations become painful. Even though we are not family, we all feel the same thing, and we can live this experience together.
Trejo and Suárez need to raise approximately $500 to make 200 hallacas or $2.50 per hallaca. If you would like to donate, you can send money via paypal to yaris91@gmail.com or mercadopago casamuseobsas@gmail.com.