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Shapes of man’ousheChristian Sleiman
(LB)
Thematic Meal, Performance, Ritual, Community, Survival, Ancestral Knowledge, Edible Landscape, Foraging, Cultural Heritage, Territory, Oral History, Food Activism, Memory, Natureculture, Food Resistance, Food Sovereignty, Commons
In French
Since 2019, the political and economic crises in Lebanon have destabilized and continuously reshaped daily life, including local food security. Out of necessity, different forms of collecting and growing food have now become a common practice in the country. Foraging sits at an intersection between food shortage and ancestral knowledge about shrubs. Gathering shrubs implies a communal instinct, a sense of awareness that these plants belong to the community that looks after them. When you forage, you take what you want and leave the rest to someone else and for the plant to be reborn the following season.
Shapes of man’oushe is a performative tasting based on foraged plants used to create a menu set that offers a glimpse into Lebanese recipes, fabulations, and foraging history.
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Christian Sleiman is a Lebanese artist based in Beirut. His practice examines different methods of food production, from foraging to industrial agriculture. Through fabulated menu sets, the research tackles the issues of food sovereignty and global dependency by looking into historical events, and political and cultural forces that reveal a larger relationship to the global food system. His current focus is the impact of western culture on the rise of the Mediterranean diet and its implication on local cuisine.