Recipes From Our Family To Yours
2025
Through Recipes from Our Family to Yours, a collaborative project with Recology’s Mimi Cheung and other contributors, Daniela Tinoco explores potlucks as a space of mutual care, where everyone contributes and is fed. The exhibited work takes the form of a zine recipe collection and series of layered Riso print collages that document and give insight into the social space Tinoco and Cheung organized with Recology staff from across the Tunnel Avenue site. After being invited to a staff potluck early in her residency, Tinoco met Cheung and was inspired to highlight the camaraderie and community building taking place amongst the people behind what might otherwise be perceived as a monolithic institution. She made plans with Cheung and cooked pots of champurrado to share as she visited employee-owners to invite them to contribute to the cookbook and next potluck.
Potlucks and community cookbooks have long been staples of gathering and relationship building–bringing together groups from friends and families to community organizers. In a potluck, we rely on one another to bring the pieces that in aggregate will be enough for everyone. The contribution of food represents a commitment to the group, as well as a curiosity about what others might introduce to your palate–and what we might learn about colleagues in the process. Each individual dish is a cultural inheritance and story to be shared, while being a part of the larger whole.
Tinoco’s practice often carries this ethos of reciprocity and communion independent of official channels–whether a company or a nation. In that autonomous space, she often finds collaborators who might not consider themselves artists and invites them to build shared meaning and honor the practices of everyday life that will continue well beyond the temporary spotlight of an artistic project. The formal construction of the framed prints and cookbook using a variety of papers scavenged from the Public Reuse and Recycling Area reflects the polyvocality of the process–irregularly shaped pages and leaflets that hold the uniqueness of each person’s story and contribution to the group’s nourishment. Through these recipes, Tinoco and Cheung remind us that we can practice care and get what we need from one another.
Daniela Tinoco is a transdisciplinary artist from Cholula, Mexico, currently living on Ohlone Land and pursuing her MFA in Art Practice at San Francisco State University. She is a co-founder of the annual Enero Zapatista Bay Area and has exhibited her work at the Berkeley Art Center, ATA Right Window, and SOMArts. Tinoco is the recipient of the 2024 Edwin Anthony & Adelaine Boudreaux Cadogan Scholarship and a member of the research group Autonomous Imaginaries: For Collective and Counter-Hegemonic Artistic Practices at the UC Berkeley Center for Race and Gender Studies.
Text by Weston Teruya