Yarinés Suárez, culinary performing artist
A conversation about grandmothers, food as national identity, and art that imitates life and life that imitates art.
+ Yarinés’ arepas tumbarranchos
this interview is part of a collection of pieces in FANZINE OCTOBER: WHAT IS A RECIPE?
Tell me about your artistic practice and how food began to become a part of your work.
Visual art is my academic background. I studied Fine Arts with a focus on drawing. A few years ago I started looking for other ways to explore my art and fell into the kitchen. Cooking was always something that I was interested in, I loved to cook and dreamed of studying culinary arts but in Venezuela it was too expensive. I started studying in 2010. Venezuela was in the middle of a crisis. I drew and it was becoming harder and harder to find things in the markets. You’d get to the supermarket and all you’d find was the packaging with nothing inside because everything had already been snatched up and all that was left was an empty box. Wait! I forgot to put on music. What do you like to listen to?
I’ll follow your performance. Put whatever you want on.
But we’re in my house! Hmmm … I’ll put on Los Colosales. This is what my dad and my uncles listened to when they came over to eat. Ok. So in Venezuela people began to form these really long lines to buy things. There were a lot of shortages that were in the interests of certain people within political establishments or economic sectors. So you were always waiting in these really long lines. I’m from Maracaibo which is a city that is 40 degrees celsius year around and the lines were like three blocks of people standing underneath the sun for hours to be able to buy a bag of harina PAN, a bag of rice, a thing of soap, essential products that were sold at regulated prices. And there was also this parallel market of essentials. Do you want a glass of papelón? It’s really refreshing. It’s perfect for a warm day and arepas.
(Yarinés has a bottle in one hand and blender jar in another. She passes some liquid from the bottle to the blender jar and back again over and over. She takes a swig. Her eyebrows furl.)
I think I put in too much water. It’s panela, which is sugar, lime and water. We call it lemon but here it’s lime. I’m going to add more lime juice and panela.
(She adds another spoonful of panela and a squirt of lime and continues to pass the liquid from the bottle to the jar and back again. Another splash in her glass. Her head cocks in confirmation and she makes me a glass.)
Let’s save a bottle for the arepas. What was I saying? The lines! So lots of people that were standing in those lines would buy and resell the products. This really complicated system developed. It was very chaotic. I didn’t really want to get into that directly. In my house, we were very fortunate that we were able to get things another way. My parents are older. It wasn’t really possible for them to stand in line. So we would find what we needed another way or pay more. I started accumulating the paper harina PAN bags to use to draw and doodle on. There was a show at the most important museum in Maracaibo and I thought, why not enter with portraits of my grandmother?
Your grandmother sold arepas, right?
Yes. I never met my grandmother but my mom always talked about her. My mom is a funny lady. She is one of those moms that tells you the same story over and over and over. She told me the same stories about my grandmother a thousand times. That she made arepas and how she made them and how she was able to sustain the family as basically a single mother of 9 children. She woke up every single day at 5 in the morning. My uncles would sell them on the street when they were little. I think just one uncle was able to study at the university and thanks to him my grandmother and the family were taken care of. They were humble but not poor. Those stories were really present in me and I decided to draw my grandmother and when I was doodling this click happened where I thought, why not draw her on these corn flour bags? That’s when I started to stitch everything together. I started reflecting on how important that product was. The importance of the idea of products in our society. If you study history, most of the modern Venezuelan cookbook is made of brands. We really cuddled up to industrialization during the petroleum era. I started studying all of that process and began putting more importance on food in my work. I started looking for other women like my grandmother. That turned into my thesis project which I called Analogías. I wanted to find women like her all over the country. I started interviewing and found ten women who were like my grandmother. Single mothers of big families who woke up early in the morning to make arepas and keep the family afloat. The interview process began to influence the drawing process and I put a lot of weight on the testimonies and included those recordings in the final work. I ended up presenting my thesis in 2014 which was the year that Venezuela really broke out into protests. It was a really tough year. I was working from a perspective that was really critical within a really chaotic space. It was really important at the time for me to be able to try to find something else within that really difficult context. I always am trying to look with fresh eyes at circumstances that are so awful. I showed those 11 portraits with the testimonials of each one talking about their lives, and the crisis was all around us, I mean, the crisis has never ended. It was really mobilising for me to present this work about a product that was so important and so essential to people but so hard to find and tell the story of these women who are so invisible, there is nothing more invisibilized than the work of a mother.
Ismenia Sánchez de Meriño from Buena Vista, Yaracuy, Venezuela; “Analogias”
Photo by Jhosenny Espinoza; Collage by Yarinés Suárez
Did your grandmother cook what we are going to eat today?
No. She made arepas that she sold on their own. I chose to make you a tumbarrancho. It is from my state of Zulia. They are really popular in my city of Maracaibo.
Did you eat them a lot there?
(Laughs) No! I think I’ve eaten them only a few times in my life. I was a vegetarian for a really long time. I also don’t really like eating a lot of fried food even though Maracaibo is known for eating everything deep fried and the tumbarrancho is a deep fried arepa. I had to call my mom, my sister, my brother. When I went to buy everything, everyone that helped me was Maracucho [someone from Maracaibo], because that’s life. I went to the butcher shop and it was a Maracucho. I have no idea how to buy meat, I hope I know how to cook it (laughs). I stayed up until 2am last night cooking. I told the butcher that I wanted to make tumbarranchos and he says My mom made me tumbarranchos for lunch! So he told me to buy roast beef and gave me his recipe which I didn’t write down. Then when I went to buy cheese, all Maracuchos. I told them I needed mortadela. What kind? they asked. To make tumbarranchos, I told them. Ahh! This one! And they told me that you needed two mortadelas per arepa, you stuff one in before you fry and another one after. They recommended the best ‘queso de mano’ that goes with this arepa and then everyone in the cheese shop told me how to make a tumbarrancho. Everyone had their own way. You make an arepa, I used harina PAN which is pre-cooked corn that you add water to. It’s my last bag and I don’t want to buy anymore. But anyway, you make the arepa and you fry it with a batter. So the cheese guy tells me Make the batter with flour, salt, water, mustard and mayonnaise. And everyone in the shop looked at him like he was crazy for adding mayonnaise. I guess it is polemic. Mustard is normal but I’ve never heard mayo. Then my mom was like don’t forget to add baking powder and make sure it has a light pancake batter consistency. I didn’t eat this a lot but it is typical of my city. We eat a lot of junk food because we are exaggerated people in every sense. We talk a lot, we are proud of our region, we think we are the best in Venezuela, very idiosyncratic. Everything good that happens in Venezuela, it’s because of us. I chose to make this because, well, Maracucha, I always put myself in the middle of a problem. Look at the meat I’ve prepared!
(She lifts the lid on a pot on the stovetop to show me her carne mechada. It’s a dark caramel brown color, juicy and smells like cumin and something sweet)
I was up until 2am last night trying things, no this is missing, uhh this needs a little more of this all night. I hope you are hungry.
What does it have? I see onion and red bell pepper. I can smell cumin.
Yeah, it has a bunch of things. It also has garlic and oregano, pepper. I think I added some paprika. Salt. It’s not very difficult. You cook the meat in an adobo of spices and when it is fork tender, you start shredding it. More garlic, onion, bell pepper, green onion, cilantro. You can add leek and celery if you have some on hand. And a little bit of fried tomato. At my house, we sauteed all the vegetables together and add it to the shredded beef but Frank grew up blending the vegetables before adding it. I added too much cumin, so I had to take a few steps back then a few steps forward trying to find the balance. I added more cilantro and parsley and a little more fried tomato. Maracuchos put everything in the arepa. Beef, chicken, tartar sauce, mortadella, a ketchup sauce and a mustard sauce.
What attracts you so much to the arepa?
I was speaking with Mercedes Golip the other day, she studies the history of Venezuelan cuisine, and she said the same thing about our contemporary food history being so connected to brands. And yeah, a lot of my work has to do with brands. There was this other action that I did in Venezuela in Aragua. It’s a beach that everyone goes to in the summer. It was a festival that was all about the culinary. I brought 8 kilos of harina PAN which was really difficult to get a hold of and created an interaction with the flour. I kneaded the dough with my whole body using water from the sea. For me it was this abstract expression that I still haven’t figured out the meaning of. The concrete action. It was really impactful because the flour was really hard to get a hold of. I was surrounded by all these people on the beach. I made this mountain of harina PAN, and like 200 people surrounded me, and I went and got water from the ocean and threw it on the flour. People got a little violent. I actually wanted to do it naked but the organizers wouldn’t let me. People were really aggressive. They started screaming at me. It was really intense. I wanted to explore the product and the idea of the product like an object of desire and take this product out of this idea of industrialization and put it into nature. Should we start the arepas? I need help cutting them.
(She hands me a small knife and shows me how to pierce them down the middle. They are cold so more compact and you have to squeeze the knife in really carefully. Then with a finger you slowly open the middle of the arepa without breaking the borders. She stuffs a slice of mortadella inside each arepa)
As I started thinking more about my grandmother I became more motivated to rescue family recipes. When I got here I was trying to find my northern star. The motivations for emigrating are pretty clear. All of my work has always been rooted in my land. I was completely connected to ideas of memory and Venezuelan identity. It was really difficult for me to figure out how to explore those themes of place within a place that is completely unknown to me. Migration has motivated this necessity to return to roots. There is something that builds inside of you during that process of migration that detonates something inside you to try to understand these ancestral flavors, these processes. It has been really interesting to see that process with other people outside of their lands trying to re-encounter their history. That was why I impulsively bought a mill. I’ve never used a mill. The first time I saw one was 14 days ago when I bought it. I want to know how to use that machine, how to make my arepas. Try to rescue the family recipes now that I can’t go back. I can’t go back in time. The ability to go to my grandmother’s home doesn’t exist. So If I don’t do this, it’s all lost. I lose a part of my identity and my memory. So my work is turning into a search to rebuild that recipe book. When you are a migrant, it’s not always possible to preserve certain traditions, the recipes of specific places or families. My family doesn’t have many recipes written down.
Did your mom make arepas like her mother did?
No. My mother used harina PAN. My grandmother had a fire pit and a wood burning stove in her patio. She processed the corn, which would go through this whole treatment with the corn, milling it, shaping and making the arepas. She made two kilos of corn dough every day. I did a performance piece making arepas in the street. I was able to find 2 kilos of corn flour which is what was permitted. That was like building a bridge between her and I because it just happened to be the same amount she made. It was strange to think of her and this work that required this very artisanal process, and me with this whole process to find a product in the middle of a shortage. It felt like this parallel struggle that manifested in very different ways.
Mamá dame Pan. Yarinés Suárez, “Analogias”
Photo of Inés Delia Finol, Yarinés’ abuela.
How do you re-capture recipes that no one ever wrote down?
So this is Casa Museo. You’re standing in it! I work with my roommate, Frank Trejo, who is also a performance artist. Our approach to artwork is that art is everything. Art isn’t just this traditional practice of making something that gets hung on a wall in a museum. Art is alive. We have been inspired to work that way thanks to relationships we have built with other artists who have turned their homes into art spaces. I make culinary art. I don’t like the word gastronomy. It just rubs me the wrong way. These are political actions too. Most of our friends are migrants too, and it is impossible for us to work from any other angle, we always work as migrant artists. From how people organize our work and how our lives inevitably cross over into our work. The pandemic has been a very intense experience. We have a lot of close friends that are dealing with incredibly difficult situations both as migrants and artists, this has quintupled the difficulty we already lived with, the precariousness of our lives.
(She grabs the queso de mano, cuts it into thick slices and quarters and does the same with the mortadella. She grabs one of the sliced arepas, submerges it gently into the batter, lets the extra batter fall back into the bowl and gently adds it to the hot oil)
I was telling you about the recipes. One day a friend called me and was like mami how do you make a hallaca? A hallaca is our tamale. I looked for recipes. I’ve made hallacas with a bunch of different people. Once with a friend who is from the Amazon side of the country and hers were really different. I started looking for the family recipe and realized that it made no sense. How can a written recipe convey so much information? The hallaca is a festive dish that every family prepares. It takes like a week to make. For me, the recipe starts with the very first action.
(She gently flips the arepa over. It crunches lightly underneath the fork. It’s light brown like a hamburger bun and looks fluffy like a pancake)
My dad would spend the entire year making friends with the best butchers in the neighborhood so that he could get the best cut of meat for his hallacas. Then it was a full day getting the meat, cleaning it, cutting it and leave it all ready for my mom. A whole other day going to get all the vegetables, cleaning and cutting everything into little cubes. Another day to buy plantain leaves which are huge, cleaning, cutting. My dad cut them into perfect squares. Impeccable. My mom would make the dough and the stew and then my dad would put together the hallacas. There were all these roles that formed in the house. This whole ritual isn't in a recipe. That lived experience. The flavor of each dish. The preparation that every single family goes through. How do you capture that? It’s a routine, it’s an experience, it’s a very specific family tradition. My family always made 200 hallacas and every family made about that much. 50 were for us and the rest were handed out and we’d be given some too. One hallaca per head. You had to share. It is all about this exchange. And everyone would try everyone else’s hallacas and critique them (laughs) like Antonio always uses too much salt or this one has too much cumin or no aunty cooked them too long and the dough is all hard or this one broke apart or this tia makes the best always. It’s like an episode of Masterchef. And then of course you say, oh tia they were amazing I love your hallacas! And then there is a big family dinner and everyone brings their hallacas and it’s this game of luck, right? You get what lands on your plate and everyone wants the hallacas from the tio that makes the best and you know exactly who made the hallaca you ended up with. That. How do you capture that? Want another beer? Should we eat?
— — — — —
This month’s fanzine goes out for free. This project lives and thrives thanks to its subscribers. If you like what you read, please consider becoming a member. You pay what you want ($2 to 5 monthly) and support free and local journalism. Gracias.