RECIPES FOR SOLIDARITY

RECIPES FOR SOLIDARITY

On love as collective labouring in Palestine and elsewhere

REGISTRATION – PAY WHAT YOU CAN

OVER THE ORGANIZERS

Recipes for Solidarity isa two-day gathering as a response to a warm invitation by Sophia, with Noor Abed, Noor Abuarafeh, Sara Abu Ghazal, Marwa Arsanios, Jumana Emil Abboud, Ernesto González, Samah Hijawi, Lara Khaldi, Reem Shilleh, Hoda Siahtiri, and Siggie Vertommen.

Sophia is the Belgian Gender Studies Network. Its primary aim is to foster research and teaching in the field of gender studies in Belgium. It also wants to stimulate collaboration in this field: across disciplines and between different universities, between the Dutch- and French-speaking communities in Belgium, and between the women’s movement, policy makers and the academic community.

The Kitchen is a place always in the making located in the centre of Brussels, an assembly of sorts, where different artists, curators and researchers share their work, cook, and hang out, where they set up events, talks and screenings, but also do their work, broadcasting, reprinting, and studying.

PROGRAM DAY 1 "LAND AS TRAVERSAL" - Film program | 7 June 2024

Screening of films at Cinéma Aventure

I Feel Everything by Jumana Emil Abboud – 2020, 09’04’’

I Feel Everything primarily draws inspiration from the Palestinian folk tale “Half-a-halfling [Nos Nsais]” – a tale about an alienated half-child, born of magic, and imagines a story of a spirit half-child, invisible and annexed from her native home. The work questions who or what is the “half-child”, and does not illustrate the story, but rather, expands on it in order to frame a comfortless existence, burdened in fragmental beingness. Inspired from water folklore that taught a spirited* relationship with water sources and their guardians – an intertwining of water, women, story, community, the living and non-living, human and other – a narrator traverses between the past and present, and between multiple voices of child, mother, animal, water source and spirit, in order to recount a tale that ultimately originates out of the unbearable state of “halfness”. I Feel Everything reweighs water folklore vis-à-vis present-day unattainability to water, and all things embodied therein, (such as homeland, life source, story, endangered heritage), and proposes its/their reanimation. 

*spirited: to possess and be possessed, to inhabit and to be inhabited, to give spirit to, animate, remember, inherit, regenerate, to acknowledge the spirit, celestial being, and spiritual within.

Our Songs Were Ready for All the Wars to Come by Noor Abed – 2022, 19’ 54’’

Our songs were ready for all wars to come is a film of choreographed scenes based on documented folk tales from Palestine. It begins with four minutes of darkness and the haunting sound of a woman’s voice. The perforated edge of the film, occasionally silhouetted by flashes of light, highlights the nature of the work as a mediated document. Images of women performing draw connections between latent stories of water wells and communal rituals associated with disappearance, mourning and death. The only narration in the film is a song, which is sung by Palestinian singer Maya Khaldi. Its lyrics are a collage of different folk tales. The film explores the critical stance of ‘folklore’ as a source of knowledge and its possible connection to alternative social and representational models in Palestine. How can folklore become a common emancipatory tool for people to overturn dominant discourses, reclaim their history and land, and rewrite reality as they know it?

Who is Afraid of Ideology?  Part 3 Micro Resistances by Marwa Arsanios – Part 3: 2020, 31 17’’

Since 2017, Beirut and Berlin-based artist Marwa Arsanios has been working on a series of remarkable films collectively titled WHO IS AFRAID OF IDEOLOGY that explore ecology, feminism, collectivity, and resistance through Indigenous and women’s communities in Kurdistan, Colombia, and Lebanon. She presents the project over two evenings, each followed by a conversation about her subjects and innovative approach.

In part 3 MICRO RESISTENCES, Arsanios turns her focus to the seed and its potential as a tool for political agency and resistance. She travels to central Colombia, where she spends time with a group of Indigenous women farmers devoted to safeguarding native seeds and agriculture. As these women buttress their communities against transnational agricultural conglomerates threatening the land, Arsanios draws parallels to the political violence indigenous communities have faced at the hands of paramilitary forces since the 1980s.

PROGRAM DAY 2 "Labour, memory, dreams and laments, (m)otherwise" | 8 June 2024

A series of workshops, conversations and a lamentation at Maison Amazone

What About the Labour of Love? cooking session with Samah Hijawi | 09:30 – 12:30, attendance by registration

Making a meal for people you care for often entails a process of dreaming up a dish (or several dishes), shopping for the right ingredients, perhaps going to a special shop where you know that the produce will be especially good. Or you might go out of your way to buy something you know that the person you care for will enjoy. Their joy when eating, is your joy, it feeds your soul as much as it nurtures theirs. Outside of the economy of capitalism and feminist calls for freedom from the kitchen, how can we account for the labour of love in making food? And what about the intangible knowledge passed on through generations, and the connections that food has to the seasons, the flavours, the nutrition, the tricks and the secrets of making good food? What would happen to all of these if we no longer take time to make food? In this session Samah Hijawi invites a group of people to gather, cook and share a meal while exploring the language of love, care and nurture embedded in making food.

Collective lunch | 12:30 – 14:00 | free attendance

We invite all participants to join us for a communal lunch to enjoy the dishes prepared in the previous cooking session. Feel free to bring something of your own as we come together to foster a sense of community and solidarity through sharing a meal.

Revolutionary Kitchens | feminist reading group with Siggie Vertommen | 14:00 – 16:00, attendance by registration

Kitchens are sites of ambivalence in feminist theory and practice. On the one hand, they are seen and experienced as spaces of gendered oppression and unequal divisions of domestic labour where women are disproportionately burdened with the crucial yet never-ending task of feeding the family and the community: preparing today’s breakfast, planning tomorrow’s lunch, cleaning up yesterday’s dinner, fixing the kids’ school lunchboxes, making grocery lists. On the other hand, kitchens are also spaces of gendered nurturance and revolutionary “counter planning” where people not only seek shelter from society’s storms, but where older and newer practices, infrastructures and fabrics of care, social reproduction and liberation are imagined and cooked to life. During this cosy and joyful reading group, we will grapple with this intimate duality of gendered oppression and liberation that is boiling in our kitchens. We will collectively read and discuss different lineages of “Revolutionary Kitchens” in feminist theory, including Autonomist, Black and Indigenous Feminist and Queer traditions. 

Things I will forget if I don’t whisper, on memory and motherhood | writing workshop with Noor Abuarafeh and Lara Khaldi | 16:00 – 18:00, attendance by registration

For this session we invited Noor Abuarafeh and Lara Khaldi to support each other’s writings, reflecting on remembering and laboring, (m)otherwise. Noor Abuarafeh will share texts from her ongoing project “127 Days” exploring the notion of motherhood as a transfer of memory, in a context where material evidence in relation to history is under threat of being erased, smuggled, destroyed or manipulated by colonial powers. The publication is an experimental novel based on a diary written by a mother to her child. While Lara Khaldi will read excerpts from her diaries published in ‘Why Call It Labor?’ comprising four essays and one conversation with artists and curators discussing their experience of becoming mothers as professionals in the arts, its reality and effects. Noor and Lara will invite the participants to write a beginning of their own story, to share and discuss them, in a supportive and caring environment.

Najme’s Dreams | reading and conversation with Sara Abu Ghazal | 18:00 – 19:00 (in Arabic with English subtitles)

In her short story collection, Dream, My Grandchild, Sara Abu Ghazal uses multiple voices to chronicle the story of the Abu Sukkar family, exiled from the North of Palestine in 1948, living in Lebanon as refugees. Following the killing of Mohammed (the patriarch) and the Zionists’ theft of their village, Zahra and her son Zain are forced into exile, leading the family to Beirut. Beginning in Shatila camp, the narrative moves between Lebanon and Palestine, the past and present—with their initial displacement serving as the narrative’s cornerstone. In the last chapter of “Ihlami Ya Sidi,” Najmeh recalls the 1948 dispossession through dreams. Through Najmeh’s dreams, we enter the often invisible side of forced and violent exile. Najmeh tells her dreams because they enable her to tell her story, which requires intimacy and vulnerability.

Lamenting Lands | performance-concert with Hoda Siahtiri and Ernesto González | 19:00 – 20:00

Lamenting Lands is an invitation to listen to bodies of land evaporating in time, and dissolving in geographies, voices from within, going inwardly.