Date of the work: 2021
Medium: Almonds, digital photos, and recorded voice
Exhibition history: Exhibited permanently online since 2021 through Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art – Manchester (UK)
The Covid-19 pandemic and the subsequent lockdown periods in 2020 and 2021 had a significant impact on Tabone’s output and exhibition plans over this period. Despite this, she continued to research feminist perspectives on prehistoric female figurines. It was during this time that she also ventured outside her established practice to produce a work of digital art, seemingly unlike any of the rest of the works she had made in the previous decade.
During the first long lockdown, Semay Wu was commissioned by the Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art (esea contemporary, previously known as the Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art) in Manchester to produce an audio cookbook, which was scheduled to be released as an online exhibition on International Mother Language Day on 22 April 2021. For this project called Sounds Like Scran, Wu invited participants to share a native recipe, images, and text, in their mother tongue, about the chosen recipe. Tabone picked Il-Biskuttini tal- Lewż, homemade almond biscuits with which she had a personal family connection growing up in Malta. In the process of producing this piece, Tabone published one of her poems for the very first time. The artist has written poetry since about 2014 but has not published any of her writings before this 2021 project, preferring to keep the poems private. The online cookbook produced by Wu for CFCCA also contains photos of Tabone holding the sweet delicacies and a sound file containing a recording of the poem being read by the artist herself.
The work is available through the Sounds Like Scran audio cookbook website by Semay Wu
