10/09/2026
The first time I saw nicole economides work was in Athens, at the gallery of my dear friend , Callirrhoë, Athens . Her paintings stayed with me, images drawn from a family archive, carried across places and generations, then looked at again through colour, scale and repetition. Through this process, the original image remains, but becomes something new: her own relationship with that memory.
So when Catharina Bonorden - Margherita Rossi and Droste Galladé invited me to create a dinner around her work, I kept returning to one thought: memory is never fixed. And recipes behave in much the same way.
The menu began with recipes that are part of my own memory, such as my grandmother’s risotto. Something I knew through her and through watching her cook long before I ever thought of it as a recipe.
I have carried it with me through different countries, kitchens and moments of my life. Each time I cook it, something shifts. The ingredients around me change, my technique changes, my palate changes, so are people eating it. What arrives on the plate today is no longer exactly her risotto, but I still recognise her in it. And somewhere along the way, I recognise myself too.
For another dish, we looked directly at Nicole’s own archive: her stuffed peppers.
In Illusion of home, as a memory, Nicole spends two hours preparing a recipe passed through her grandfather’s family. A dish traditionally carried through generations of women, and one she reclaims through the simple act of cooking it herself, in her studio, on her own terms.
Bringing the peppers onto our table felt like continuing that gesture.
Two recipes, two memories, both inherited and transformed. Neither reproduced exactly as it was.
Perhaps recipes are also a kind of family archive. We inherit them, carry them with us, change them and allow the places and people we encounter to become part of them.
This dinner was not about recreating the past.
It was about remembering it from where we are now.
