Siona Peterous

Siona Peterous is a multidisciplinary artist and writer working across audio, photography, and live activations. Her practice blends storytelling, cultural memory, and community connection. Her work is deeply informed by her decade-long career in journalism, where she’s spent years interviewing, documenting and deep-diving into why and how people do the things they do. 

Show Statement

GEZANA, the Tigrinya word for “our home,” emerges from Siona’s ongoing curiosity about how people define home beyond the physical. After working on several projects exploring different themes of home, including curating an exhibit at Creative Grounds D.C., she is now turning the lens inward.

Gezana highlights how taste is the link to our pasts, the anchor for our present, and flexible enough to help shape our collective futures. 

For Siona, home has never been a physical space. It exists in music, in scent, in people, and most consistently, in taste and the ritual of food. At the center of this is coffee, boon in Tigrinya. One of her earliest memories is of her mother roasting coffee beans for neighbors, her grandmother, and her aunt, while the women gathered to laugh, talk shit, give advice and share stories for hours.

Boon as a site of communion, gossip, and joy has shaped Siona’s perception of food as a vehicle for connection: one that transcends borders, language and immigration status. Above all - Gezana is testament of how our homes are made up of moments, traditions and practices and nothing is more relatable or tangible than the way that food, and our ceremonies around what we eat and drink, shapes our relationship with memories of home.