Paige Emery: The Banana Leaf is a Container Technology

Paige Emery: The Banana Leaf is a Container Technology
A Kamayan Feast presented by Active Cultures and The Brick

During this year’s fall equinox, artist Paige Emery will create a Filipinx Kamayan feast in collaboration with Los Angeles chef Ria Dolly Barbosa, amidst the olive grove of Arlington Garden. For the first in a series co-presented by Active Cultures and The Brick, the program offers a spread of food and flowers served on banana leaves, where we will be seated on the earth and eating by hand—as Emery invites us to gather under the changing season’s sun and experience ecopoetic rituals interspersed throughout the course of the afternoon.

Paige Emery is an artist, herbalist and plant dreamer exploring rituals of remembering the Earth. Her work is invested in interweaving healing arts and critical ecology, ancestral memory and embodied futurities, ecopoetics and socioenvironmental praxis. About this performance, she explains:

The banana leaf is a container technology: that which holds, carries, nourishes, passes on, brings home. Through the ceremonial gathering of Kamayan, the banana leaf holds a scaffolding for ways of relationship. The Filipino practice of eating from banana leaves by hand faded under Spanish and American colonial rule, as it was deemed uncivilized. Through colonization, bananas were also turned into a monoculture market of exploitation, the severing of connection between humans and land, a foundational pillar to dominate humans and land. But the leaf of the banana still carries the memory of communal gathering—a container for remembering how we hold each other in community and how we are held by the Earth that nourishes us. Plants carry ancestral medicine throughout time and space, their form a re-remembering ways of moving with and honoring the cycles of life. 

This event will include a display of Emery’s paintings made on banana leaf fibers using oil paint handmade from traditional Filipino medicinal plants and created as talismans for earthly cycles. The event will start promptly at 4 pm.

This event is part of ECOTONES, a collaborative programming series presented on the occasion of the exhibition Life on Earth: Art & Ecofeminism at The Brick. Four public programs will be led by an artist or artist-collective to explore local agriculture, foraging, food and herbalism as ritual, and biodiversity.

Through this collaboration, these two L.A.-based art organizations are modeling an ecofeminist ethos by sharing authorship, and collectively generating materials and resources. Taking place in conjunction with the Getty Foundation’s ambitious initiative PST ART: Art & Science Collide, ECOTONES will be part of a region-spanning cultural moment, reaching vast audiences interested in the intersection of art, food, feminism, and sustainability. 

Support for this program series is provided by Kim and Keith Allen-Niesen, The Maurice Marciano Family Foundation, and Olivia Marciano. 

Lead support for Life on Earth: Art & Ecofeminism is provided by Getty and PST Art: Art & Science Collide, with additional generous support by The Margaret Morgan and Wesley Phoa Fund, The National Endowment for the Arts, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The Knox Foundation, Teiger Foundation, and the Wilhelm Family Foundation.