Antonella Tignanelli
What are the origins of your creation?
I started cooking because I would always see my grandmother doing it and it felt very magical how out of a couple of ingredients, things would start shaping up and becoming the source of ephemeral pleasure for so many people. This was limited to the realms of my household, but as I grew up and inside of my discipline, I realized that cooking and learning how to do it, could also connect me to the households and the histories of many different people around the globe, and that seemed very stimulating. So nowadays when I do what I do, I feel like I am connecting to the origins of a lot of different predecessors that shaped the way we eat, and I try to highlight those stories, those grandmothers and those reunions and keep writing them.
What is your ritual to connect with your inner self?
Cooking per se is something that connects me with what's deepest inside of me, I believe. It is a great emotional thermometer, and it's thrilling how the food varies so much according to my moods, hormones, and moments of life.
I pay a lot of attention to astrology and planetary movements too, it's just one of the things I learnt on the way of trying to connect to my most true self, and sometimes when there is a full moon, eclipse, or some major event in the sky I do a ritual of evoking and manifesting all of what I think is important to achieve in my life. I also live the education of my son as a huge exercise to try to live up to my own values and my own truth.
‘Cooking per se is something that connects me with what's deepest inside of me, I believe. It is a great emotional thermometer, and it's thrilling how the food varies so much according to my moods, hormones, and moments of life.’
How do you contribute to shape the future?
I try to be coherent with what I believe in, and communicate that in most areas of what I do. Every project I get involved nowadays has something related either to the care of our planet, or to the care of the people who inhabit it, by bringing consciousness through different proposals and in many different areas that influence the way we eat, consume, produce and relate.
We all have a huge responsibility nowadays to ask ourselves the question of how do we contribute to shape the future, because the future has become a very uncertain place. I think that by honoring the stories of our origins and trying to incorporate some of those values to the way we relate to the earth and to others has become vital, and I hope I can be a part of that chain of action and invite others to do the same with my work.
Who is your biggest Muse?
My biggest Muse is Nature... and Venus.
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