CROSSING THE CARIBBEAN IN A FILLED JOURNEY CAKE. Action performed at the former Customs headquarters in Sint Nicolaas, Aruba. With support from Atelier’89, 2017.

In Crossing the Caribbean… I sought to intertwine my culinary practice and my migrant identity in an intimate and performative act. The gesture of preparing food becomes a metaphor for displacement, belonging, and resistance that reflects the complex experience of migration in the Caribbean, especially in relation to labor dynamics and economic precarity. I use a dish that has traveled across centuries and continents, the Journey Cake (or Johnny Cake), as a symbol of diaspora and cultural exchange.

The preparation of 150 of these cakes, alongside Mrs. B. Gario, a resident of the Sint Nicolaas community, adds a collaborative and communal dimension to the work. Our experience as workers in this land, although geographically close, feels distant in terms of belonging. The Journey Cake also connects to the history of forced mobility in the Caribbean, where simple food and recipes have allowed migrants to cope with their journeys.

During the opening night of the fair organized by Ateliers’89, I recreated a stall selling these Journey Cakes and invited visitors to engage in a dialogue through three questions: Where do you come from? What are you doing here? Where are you going? As they answer, I fill each cake with salted cod and stamp the title of the work on the wrapping paper. The one-on-one interaction not only blurs the boundaries between host and migrant but also references the intimacy and reciprocity that emerge from the temporality of “passing through.” The video projection accompanying the performance mixes images from the first version of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, archival footage of the island, and documentation of the cakes’ preparation. This audiovisual collage juxtaposes the myth of exploration with the reality of exploitation, where migrant bodies are functional, moving between industries and geographies.

With this work, I bid farewell to Aruba after a period of irregular migration, during which a work contract as a cook became a vehicle for integration, but also a form of invisibility and dependency. The recurring themes of my practice—migration, hospitality, food, and economic exploitation—find a new outlet here.