Puerto Rican artist in Milwaukee intersects food and art in interactive project

CK Ledesma paused while dicing a white onion. They held back tears when they pictured their grandmother doing the same.

They're making conbif, a Puerto Rican recipe made using canned corned beef.

Ledesma gathers the ingredients in a small kitchen in Riverwest. One can of corned beef, one can of tomato sauce, diced potatoes, a plantain, sazon seasoning and a labor of love served on a bed of white rice.

For Ledesma, the act of cooking is a performance. To gather colorful ingredients that are equally pleasing to the eyes and tongue is a delicate art.

Ledesma, a self-described "un-disciplinary" artist from San Juan, Puerto Rico, who has lived in Milwaukee for 16 years, uses their art to connect to community.

In 2020 Ledesma turned their favorite childhood meal into an interactive project that brought their community together despite the inevitable distance and isolation that came with the COVID-19 pandemic.

Proyecto Conbif was created to build connectivity at a tough time

That year Ledesma won a Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowship, a program through the Greater Milwaukee Foundation that awards funds to established or emerging Milwaukee artists to support their work.

At first, Ledesma wasn’t sure what their fellowship project would be.

When the world shut down, Ledesma went back to Puerto Rico. Much like everyone else that year, they were anxious about the uncertainty that surrounded them.

“Connecting with people has always been really central to my practice and to the things I do as an artist,” they said. “I was interested in connecting with people through time. ... I didn’t know how I was going to do it, but food was one of the things that always came back up when dealing with uncertainty.”

As Ledesma sat in their childhood home, they revisited childhood memories. Ledesma took comfort in food. Breaking bread had always provided them with a sense of belonging and togetherness.

So Ledesma decided to mail meal kits to friends and family with ingredients to make Puerto Rican conbif. In the boxes, Ledesma included cooking instructions with a request. They asked friends to send back a video, picture, letters or any form of media that showed them making it.

“I also felt like it was really important for me to transport people into my kitchen while not being able to have friends to visit,” Ledesma said.

Ledesma created a Spotify playlist with salsa and rumba music that they would listen to with their grandparents growing up.

“The playlist is really important to the project so people can grasp a bit of that feel of what it's like to be where I am,” they said.

Ledesma also was motivated to support post offices during a time they felt those places were under attack in 2020.

Ledesma sent the meal kits to 10 people at first and intentionally sent some to people who are not Puerto Rican.

“That was also part of that transportive experience,” they said. “It’s taking you elsewhere while we are confined to our own space. It's like a little bit of a portal.”

The feedback was overwhelming. Recipients loved the meals and were excited to participate.

Proyecto Conbif — "Project Conbif" — was born.

“It felt to me like my grandmother was still alive in a way because I had learned this recipe and how to make it from her because of my obsession with it as a little kid,” they said. “I know that my mom and my grandmother are so proud of their food, and they make it as such an extension of who they are as humans, as caregivers.”

How conbif arrived in Puerto Rico

Part of the project also included researching how the dish became a staple to Puerto Ricans. After some research into their own family, Ledesma learned the connection to the dish and the transatlantic slave trade. They found that enslaved laborers were fed corned beef.

"Corned beef specifically is such a part of our cultural identity as people and each Caribbean country has their way of making this dish different with different ingredients with different ways that it has become a staple," Ledesma said.

"I was also interested in how as people in Puerto Rico in the Caribbean ... we've taken something that is trauma-based and turn it into something joyful and can turn it into something that is a staple of our identity."

Where Proyecto Conbif is now

Three years later, Ledesma is still collecting materials from the project, although it's not as active. They hope to eventually turn Proyecto Conbif into an archive with a collection of all the essays, poems and photos people sent.

The project also inspired Ledesma's friend, Kantara Souffrant, to feature her own version of the project in a college class she taught that discussed, "What is America?". In the discussion, she had students pick five dishes and give ingredients to those dishes to students in the class. Then the students discussed the dishes via Zoom.

"It kind of grew into its own thing," Ledesma said. "That's sort of what I wanted to do, is have folks have this live on without me."

This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Milwaukee Puerto Rican artist uses food, culture to connect to roots