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λεμόνι lemon ليمون citron (lemóni lemon lymun citron), 2025
sound installation (duration: 55:01)

by C. Grace Chang

I made this sound installation last autumn during the Evia Residency, a part of the PROSPER Project (supported by Creative Europe). We artists-in-residence lived in southern Evia, the largest island in Greece, and created artworks in response to the island's pattern of heat, drought, and high winds, resulting in devastating wildfires.

I chose to focus on the relationship between taste, memory, and place. Tastes (which are technically smells) get routed directly through the limbic system to the amygdala and hippocampus, parts of the brain related to emotion and memory. By working with local food products and regenerative farmers, I wanted to create a work that would dive into this special connection between food, memory, and the land.

This re-working of λεμόνι lemon ليمون citron for the Climate Histories ESEH Conference uses, instead, local Swedish produce. I invite you to sit down, taste the items on the table, and see what memories may emerge for you.

In this ongoing project, I am archiving place through memory and local tastes.
If you'd like to submit a sound file, please scroll down to the end.

photos by Orestis Seferoglou

original statement from the exhibition in 2025:

This sound-based work emerged from a curiosity about the connection between food, memory, and places. Though we may lose places in many ways—war, politics, climate change, migration, time—they live on in our stories. During a series of recorded interviews over local produce, participants narrate memories that resurface with each bite, transporting us to places frozen in time.

This project aims to map out memories of such places, and how they might be resurrected. How taste and place are connected. How grief and climate change intertwine. How, through all of this, memory becomes an indestructible force.

Throughout this residency, I conducted these interviews with locals restoring their lands in southern Evia through regenerative farming techniques. Over small bowls of local produce—lemon, prickly pear, pomegranate, rosemary, olives, and more—together we ate the foods one by one and allowed memories to emerge.

In these recorded sessions, we explore these memories in their mother tongues or languages of preference (Greek, Arabic, English, French). Memory comes from a deep place, and I wanted the most direct experience possible.

You are invited to rest, to gaze out at the sea and let the sounds of memory wash over you, to remember/resurrect your own lost places.

Want to submit a taste memory of your own?
Click here for instructions & submission form.