Areperas are Venezuelan gathering spaces where arepas are sold 24/7 every day of the year. This virtual event reimagined Areperas, offering a guided culinary experience contextualizing Venezuelan food culture, immigration, and hybridity. The experience of cooking together, while apart, mirrors that of the myriad of migrants in search of familiar and nostalgic, often unreproducible flavors. Home-made pantry boxes were available to order with locally sourced American ingredients that meld traditional Venezuelan flavors.

Watch the recording from the Virtual Arepera here.

Mercedes Golip is a creative and curious cook, marketing consultant, and media developer from Venezuela currently based in Queens. With her experimental culinary project, “My Kitchen, Farm to Table,” she creates Venezuelan-inspired food with American ingredients; each menu crafted and planned seasonally, combining flavors, ideas, and ingredients from a new geographical and social context.

Notions of Exile is a virtual exhibition and series of programs, co-curated by Fabiola R. Delgado and Faride Mereb. The project explores the cultural influence of the largest recorded refugee crisis in the Americas—the forced migration of six million Venezuelans from their homeland—using Venezuelan writer and journalist Aquiles Nazoa’s stories of exile and migration as a metaphorical “table” around which the co-curators have gathered artists from Venezuela and its diaspora. The participants include Génesis Alayón, Leonardo Almao, Miguel Braceli, Deborah Castillo, Alexander Chaparro, Gabriela García, Mercedes Golip, Samoel González, Franklin Hurtado, Diana López, Henry Rueda, Henry Solórzano, Ugo Ulive, Graciela Yáñez Vicentini, and Luis Moreno Villamediana.