Meet the C.H.E.F

C | Cultural
H | Host
E | Experience Maker
F | Food Artist

​

"Something absolutely magical and mysterious happens with me when my spatula kneels at the base of a pan. Something fairylike transpires when the aroma from that pan oozes from the air and dissipates within my senses. Something surreptitious occurs when flavors dance and sing in harmony before the bare eyes of a stove. Most people call it cooking. I call it resurrecting." 

​​

Chef is technically correct. It just hasn't been big enough for the work for a while.

​

At Sacred Table, I use C.H.E.F. to name a broader practice. I cook, yes. I also write, facilitate, curate, design experiences, make multidisciplinary work, gather artists and communities, and build spaces where food can be in conversation with performance, land, movement, film, photography, ritual and whatever else the work calls for. I've done this alongside a 20+ year career as an NPO/NGO professional systems architect and resource mobiliser. 

​

I am Haitian-American, and my practice has been shaped across California, Haiti, South Africa and the many places I have lived, worked, cooked and traveled. Before Sacred Table had a name, I was opening my home in the East Bay several nights a week and feeding whoever came through the door. Those tables eventually became pop-ups, catering and curated dining experiences. Years later in Johannesburg, I founded Lang De Moun Mon, where restaurant, art space, performance venue and gathering place lived under one roof.

Sacred Table grew from there.

​

Food remains one of my primary materials. I am interested in what ingredients carry, how people have moved food across borders and generations, what happens because culinary practice is an artistic practice, and how a meal can become part of a much larger experience. My Haitian foodways sit next to techniques, ingredients and knowledge gathered through years of cooking and living across the Global South and diaspora.

​

I am also an interdisciplinary artivist, facilitator, strategist and longtime nonprofit practitioner. Those practices are not separate when I enter Sacred Table. They inform how I build an experience, work with collaborators, facilitate a room, think about resources, understand institutions and move an idea from the Imagination Space into the Future-Present™.

​

The C.H.E.F.

​

C | Cultural
Culture is living material in my practice. I work with what has been carried, changed, protected, forgotten, borrowed, contested and created across places and generations.

H | Host
Hosting was the beginning. I open doors, build tables and create conditions for people and ideas to encounter one another. The table may be in a home, gallery, on a trail, around a fire or somewhere we have not gone yet.

E | Experience-Maker
I work across disciplines to give ideas physical form. Food may meet performance, installation, movement, film, land, writing, facilitation or participation. The form follows what we are trying to make.

F | Food Artist
Food is material, language and practice. The kitchen is one of my studios. Cooking, plating, sourcing, feeding and eating all have creative possibilities worth taking seriously.

​​

I cook to cement my aliveness. It is not a labor of love, for it is not laborious. It is a labyrinth of liberty. I aim for from-scratch cooking, meaning if there is a way to create it from its beginning, I will do just that, or try really hard to maintain its natural integrity.

​

Bon appétit, dear loves. Bon appétit.