Lafayette installation recreates a grandmother’s kitchen | Entertainment/Life

Bob Borel handed me a stack of napkins and pointed to a metal napkin holder that once belonged to his mom. 

“My mom folded each one like a taco,” he said. “Just folded them once. I remember her doing it so clearly.”

So he and I sat at a table that looked a lot like the one in his grandmother’s kitchen and folded napkins.

It looked a lot like my grandmother’s table, too.

That’s how my Thursday afternoon went in Lafayette last week — folding napkins, hanging pictures — and learning about Borel’s inspiration.

With help from friends, particularly Erin Broussard and Philip Frey, he’s doing his best to recreate his grandmother’s Catahoula kitchen and living room.

Borel is a Lafayette artist and living history interpreter at Vermilionville who, for the past several months, has been building an installation at Basin Arts called “Mom Mom’s: The Sacred Ordinary” — in homage to the St. Martin Parish home of his grandmother, Yola Courville.

She passed away in 2013, but Borel has been reconstructing the heart of her home in as much detail as he can manage, gathering pieces from friends, estate sales, thrift stores, Goodwill and eBay.

“For anybody who doesn’t know much about installations,” he told me, “just think of it as one giant piece of art that you can walk through.”

The room already felt real: mock-wood paneling, a crocheted afghan on the sofa, ashtrays loaded with ash (from incense), a console television, a black rotary phone and a faded Holly Hobby wall hanging.

Borel and I hung his grandmother’s framed Last Supper above the television. He told me that when he was a kid and learned that Leonardo da Vinci painted the Last Supper, he asked, “The one at Mom Mom’s house?”

Borel has mixed family photographs with estate-sale finds, including a mass-produced portrait of a woman who came with the frame. It’s staying that way.

He’s created his own hidey hole in the installation, a tucked-away spot to represent where he sometimes spent time growing up — his personal rebellion against Cajun culture, documented for the record. It’s just a chair in a corner, with a Rolling Stone magazine (with Pee-Wee Herman on the cover), a Black Flag cassette and a Walkman.

“At one point, the last thing I wanted to be was Cajun,” he said. “And then once I was away from it, I thought, ‘What do you mean other people aren’t like this?’”

The installation sits inside Basin Arts’ Project Space Residency program, now in its fifth year. Clare Cook, Basin Arts’ founder and creative director, said the residency gives artists space and support to spend several months pursuing a large idea.

“Every single time,” Cook said, “the gallery does something it’s never done before. But this is a first. We’ve never had a kitchen.”

While Borel and I worked, Carey Hamburg arrived with a cabinet destined to become the kitchen sink base.

When the sink didn’t fit quite right, nobody seemed worried. They made plans to fix it. The whole afternoon operated on that same frequency: unhurried, improvisational, held together by something other than an exact plan.

Borel talked about the Cajun tradition he’s trying to honor — les veillées, getting together at someone’s house and just talking, like the Sunday afternoons at his grandmother’s in Catahoula with most of the family present, hours of conversation, coffee passed around on a tray.

“That kind of community,” he said, “always feels Cajun to me.”

He wants visitors to feel it, too.

When the installation opens Saturday night during Lafayette’s Second Saturday Art Walk, Borel will have a table near the entrance with small paper bags. He’ll ask people to slip their phones in the bags and tuck them away — not to confiscate them, but just to create a reminder of life without their presence.

Then he wants people to come sit in the living room.

Stay a while.

Talk.

Borel hopes visitors will think about what parts of their own lives are worth preserving.

“In 100 years,” he said, “what would the Vermilionville version of this look like?”

The napkins went into the holder, folded into triangles the way his mother always did them. The holder found the center of the Formica table.

We hung pictures where they felt right, not at any prescribed gallery height.

His grandmother’s quilts — she made one for each of her 12 children’s families — will fill the room before Saturday.

His family is planning to gather at Mom Mom’s next month to play bourré, nieces and nephews included.

“Mom Mom’s: The Sacred Ordinary” opens to the public on June 14, during Lafayette’s Second Saturday Art Walk at Basin Arts, 311 Beaumont Drive, Lafayette. Borel’s installation runs through mid-July.