Kanisha Talsania
Bridge 3: Collective Memory Site
Prompt: In groups of 3–4, research and explore an NYC site through observation and interviews with people connected to it. Each member will create an individual artifact based on their interests and skills. Together, these works will form a cohesive installation or exhibition that documents and reimagines the site’s layered histories and meanings. The project asks, How do places hold stories? Which narratives are visible or hidden? How can collaborative research inspire creative responses?
This project explores Ferrara Bakery & Café in Little Italy as a site of cultural memory, tradition, and community within New York City’s Lower East Side. Through collective research, interviews, and site visits, our group examined how food, family businesses, and everyday rituals preserve identity across generations. Founded in 1892, Ferrara Bakery has remained a lasting symbol of Italian-American culture, maintaining its original recipes, family-centered atmosphere, and role as a gathering space despite the neighborhood’s ongoing changes through immigration, tourism, and gentrification. My individual artifact is a handmade bake book that translates this research into a tactile and sensory experience. Inspired by Ferrara’s visual history and the emotional connection people have with food, the book combines illustration, storytelling, recipes, and material experimentation to reflect themes of memory, heritage, and tradition. Using vintage-inspired aesthetics, warm tones, wood sheets, layered collage elements, and butter paper resembling bakery packaging, the project aims to evoke the feeling of flipping through a family recipe collection passed down through generations. The book focuses on how taste, smell, and recipes can act as carriers of memory. Influenced by interviews emphasizing Ferrara’s commitment to preserving its original recipes, the project explores how food reconnects people to childhood, family, and cultural identity. To deepen the sensory experience, the book was also designed with a sweet bakery scent so that while interacting with it, viewers would be reminded of the smell and atmosphere of Ferrara Bakery itself. Through sketches, layered materials, scent, and handmade construction, the bake book reimagines Ferrara Bakery not only as a bakery, but as an archive of immigrant history, family tradition, and shared community experience.