Kristina Leko: The recipe, audio, Croatian, 1999
My name is Kristina, and I believe that the united labour on cakes is very healthy. I tried to solve all of my problems with the cake, and as a result, in a Cake Factory there was a Tricake, made from three cakes, and the finest ingredients. It solved all of my dilemmas, and the recipe is the following:
The bottom part of the cake is from honey. In ancient times, people would offer a rounded honey-bread to their ancestors, and the ancient Slavs called it – “kolae ”. The later meaning of the cake was – a present to a friend or a guest. Therefore for the bottom part, make the honey dough. The basic ingredients are: honey and wheat flour. While you are working on it, apart from the bees, remember also your ancestors.
The middle part of the cake is Croatian corn based cake from the coast. The corn does not grow along the coast, and it came to Europe from America. Despite of it, our people from the coast enjoy their corn cake for more than 200 years. The ingredients are: corn flour, yeast, figs and raisins. While the cake is baking, think of all that preceded it: the discovery of America, then it was necessary to learn all about the corn, then there had to be made a connection between the inland and the coast and vice versa. Think more! A similar kind of cake is eaten in some other parts of the world; because a cake that exists only in one part, and does not resemble any other, does not exist. Recipes always travel the world. Like corn, like people.
The top part of the cake is a contemporary, everyday American cake – brownie. It stands here as an example because of my personal reasons; namely I was in love with an American, and brownies are made as follows: slowly melt butter and chocolate then stir in sugar, vanilla, eggs, flour and walnuts. Then bake. On the top of your Tricake you can add some other cake, as long as it is going to be liked by the ones you are offering it to. I mean, the cake shall come out well only if it was done with the heart. This is most easily achieved if you are doing it for somebody you like.
The cake you can taste here in Gundulia eva 5, is exquisite. I think it is because in a cake factory in Preradovia eva 22, despite the present problems, there are persons, such as myself, who believe that cakes still can change the world.
Kristina Leko
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In the End, Every Story Can Have a Happy Ending
‘ A “man” is a talking animal, because it is a creature destined to start things, a creature that needs to orientates in the world, without being present at the ‘true‘ beginning as an alert witness. It is its destiny that it cannot start communicating with itself as a mute animal that smells open space, but starts to assimilate itself in the moment when its language produces itself. Therefore it shuts the hole of its beginning by stories and starts to entangle among them as a creature without its beginning.’
Peter Sloterdijk,
“Coming into the world, arriving to language”
From our everyday contacts we know that the exchange of personal experiences through a story is something unavoidably important. Through telling and narrating, we affirm our connection and communication with the world, letting it obtain some new qualities. The narrator’s personal affirmation is oftenly entangled with various unpleasantness and likely to flee. Why is it so?
Communication is at the same time an open, very personal, but pretty general phenomenon influenced by stereotypes. There is no sphere of our activities that could not be covered by this mutual denominator.
Food consumption, reading books, mass media, seduction, production, sex, religion –are all various modes of communicational acts that confirm our own conditioning in a world and the individual attempts of stepping from one structure into another.
Whenever we talk, we always present something through some media, no matter whether we inspect the form of our personal story within the context of art or everyday life, from scratch we ‘entangle life’ and examine the non/power of language and limits of personal speech. ‘The language extends over various fields of our everyday life, uniting them into a coherent whole’. Although we can actualise and unite the disrupted reality with language practice, within this practice there are the troubles of every autobiographer with higher ambitions. When he searches for union and the genuine, autobiographer’s expression faces multiple difficulties and paradoxes.
The recent art piece by Kristina Leko we explain as an autobiography of a different kind. The author endlessly replenishes both life and fiction; it is an open process. In the case of non controlling the beginning is it not acceptable to believe that with a happy end, ends also the story production?
by Ana Dević
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Kristina Leko
Born in 1966, Zagreb, Croatia.
Lives and Works in Zagreb.
