Waterbody with three mothers
Performance (in development)
2025
Performed as a works-in-progress at Metàfora 25 in Barcelona, Spain
Images © Fay Toshack
This work began as an investigation of food and its connection to my adoption identity. I piled, placed, drew, and ate four ingredients: salt, brown sugar, caraway seeds, and water. The four international ingredients of Latvian rye bread, the four ingredients I mixed and made potions with when I was a child in the United States.
My ancestors ate this bread during Soviet occupation, brief periods of freedom, Imperial Russian rule. It sustained them. My tongue didn't taste rye bread until I was 23 years old. What to do with this empty space that international adoption leaves in the body--
When I was a child, I made magic. Potions from ingredients in my mother’s kitchen. This performance is an invocation to reconnect with that magic and explore the international adoptee experience in my body.