This dried pepper, kept for over a decade, is an affective archive disguised as a humble object—given to me by a Hungarian woman who herself received it from her mother’s garden. Its wrinkled, translucent surface carries the weight of time, travel, and quiet generosity, turning a vegetable into a vessel of memory. What began as a gesture of hospitality has become a symbolic relic that resists decay through narrative rather than preservation. Integrated into the artistic practice, the pepper shifts from food to document, from biology to metaphor, revealing how small offerings can hold the emotional density of migrations, inheritances, and shared tenderness.
