My Favorite doll (Chile) "My doll is called the Sandrita. This is a classic Piel Angeli doll. These dolls began to be made in Argentina around the 1950s. My grandfather gave it to me as a gift in 1972 when I was born. My grandfather worked for the railway company, he was a public worker. They had a kind of union, a cooperative, and it was through this cooperative that public workers could buy things on credit.
Unlike my grandmother, my grandfather had a liberal mind. My grandmother was very Catholic, as it is common in Latin America. I am more spiritual but I am not very religious, and my the fact that he was freer in his thoughts let us be closer. My grandfather respected my way of thinking.
I was his first granddaughter and according to him I was his favorite. He was so happy when I was born that he forgot he left the barbecue on. All the meat he prepared to celebrate my birth with my family burned. We were good friends my grandfather and I. We lived next door to him, I grew up with him. There were parties for the children of railway company employees when I was little and we always went together. Afterwards, with the dictatorship in Chile, things changed a lot, the social situation became more difficult, the company was no longer the same and my grandfather got old ...”

The memory of the palace (Cuba). “We have always used this book at home in Cuba for cooking recipes. I got it from my ex-husband's grandmother. My mother-in-law always told me how her mother often liked to bake cakes called panetelas and fish in the Biscay style (we have a strong heritage of Spanish cuisine). But in Cuba, ingredients started to run out, especially in the nineties, and she had to replace a few with others that we still had at that time. For example, to replace the Royal brand powder, she used baking soda, because there was a lot of it. The amount of eggs also had to be reduced and for the custard she replaced the condensed milk with the same amount of white sugar. When we didn't have bread flour, we had to use breadcrumbs. That way, it looks to me that we could write a side book with the new ingredients and the modifications made by the grandmother. There must not be many copies of this book in Cuba now. Fortunately in Montreal, it's easy to find all the ingredients I need, and there we can eat Cuban cuisine like we used to do.”

Tell stories with cards (France) “ I must have been about ten years old when my grandmother chose me, among all the women in my family, to pass her knowledge on to me. She first drew me the cards one day, then a few years later, she called me aside to teach me ... That day, she took out a beautiful fabric and put it on the table and she started to draw the cards… I was intrigued, I asked a lot of questions about the figures, it takes time to learn all that… It was only a few years later that I started doing it too, when I was a teenager and especially with my friends… Reading the cards is complex. While each card has a meaning in itself, the most important meaning lies in how they relate with each other, in the way they are placed throughout the game.
My profession is writing and I am also a storyteller. I deeply feel that when my grandmother chose me to pass this knowledge on to me, she also left me the job of telling stories. You draw the cards, you see the elements and how they play together and you tell. With the cards, we tell what we see. It’s about reading and telling. She told me stories anyway my Mimi. She chose special times to explain me the world ... And in fact, the first stories I told professionally were the stories she told me when I was a kid. ”

The tree of lovers (Haiti). “I don't really know since when this canteen has been in the family. This object is used by women to bring food to their husbands. Traditionally, my grandmother insisted that she was the one who prepared the food, then she put the food in that canteen to take it to my grandfather. It has different compartments. Each one can contain a different food: the sticky rice that we always eat, the vegetables, the meat, the sauce and the plantain ... They would sit down and eat together. They told each other how it was at home and in the field. I find it to be an important object because it not only serves to bring food to someone you love, but it also creates a moment of intimacy for two. It is not very clear what they said to each other while they were eating.
My grandmother told me that in those days there was a tree with a flower called ila-ila. It is a flower that has an extraordinary smell. They called it the lovers tree because back in my grandparents' days, it was there that lovers would sit for the man to court the woman. It was common for couples to sit next to eat as well.”

To make choices to keep only the essentials (Berbers or Imazighen, North Africa). "This object is called assiar or agharbel (Berber language). It was my mother who gave it to me. She gave me the little one because it was easy to carry. My mother made couscous with this assiar. Making couscous takes several steps and you have to sort the wheat several times. For me, this preparation contains a very deep philosophy. The flour has to be sifted several times and it is like a kind of metaphor for life. We go through stages that allow us to leave things that are no longer for us and we keep the other things with which we continue to live: the dearest friends and relatives.
All my family remains in Algeria. We are fourteen brothers and sisters. I am the only one who left our country. My mother knows how to do almost everything, she is a very strong and wise woman. She does pottery, weaving, cooking… everything! And whatever she does, she does for love. The taste of my mother's couscous, I haven't tasted it in another place yet.
We are Berbers. We are not Arabs. When the Arabs arrived in our region, they imposed their language and ours, the Berber language, was prohibited. But I speak my language for love, it’s my mother’s language.”

The sad wedding dress (China). “I’m Chinese and I met my boyfriend in China. We had been together for a year and one day we decided to go to France to study but for our parents, it was impossible for us to leave the country without getting married. It is very frowned upon in China to leave the country as a couple without getting married. We feel like we were forced to marry because even though we loved each other and it was our decision to be together, we felt that marriage was not on our plans, yet. We had less than a week to go. I only had an hour to choose my wedding dress.
I bring my wedding dress wherever I go, in France and also in Quebec. In my performative artist, the theme of forced marriage is recurrent in my work and this is how I am able to get through this difficult experience. In China, when a woman is over 25 and she is not married, people think she must have a problem. There are now many women in China who are not interested in getting married, but society doesn’t want them to think like that. This is a situation that generates a lot of tension even at work. Business owners believe that a single woman over the age of 25 may not be a good person and is considered abnormal.”

Memory projected on film (Brazil, Italy and Lebanon). “When I was 4 my parents separated and I moved to my grandparents' house. So, my first memories of my life are with them in Santa Barbara. Life changed at home when I was 10 years old. My grandfather had a stroke. I feel like I lost him then. He spent 23 years as a vegetable. He always needed someone to move. His body gradually froze over time. He was of Italian origin and my grandmother's family were Lebanese. My grandfather's story is interesting and I feel very inspired by him, because he was very poor when he arrived in Brazil, but over time he even became the mayor of his city. My grandmother came from a very wealthy family, they decided to be together and because of that she was left out of her family for years.
I keep these photos of my grandfather because I want to remember the man he was before his illness. I want to remember that he was a strong and tall man, that he had a lot of energy and that he was able to change his reality when he had the chance. I am a film director and my goal is to make a project to create a memory of his life.”