Edible Landcapes, Edible Bodies
Foraging is an effective method of both ethnobotanical knowledge transmission and embodied research. As a practice, it requires us to engage all our senses and get out on the land. It creates the ideal conditions for learning and connecting to plants and the land we share with them. Yet foraging is also a tool for social and ecological movement building and healing. Edible Landscapes, Edible Bodies brings together artists, activists, fermentation explorers, growers, gastronomes and ethnobotanists to address questions around healing, justice and sympoiesis through a journey into outer and inner edible landscapes, from people to plants, from land to the microorganisms who make up our bodies and to which we owe our health and that of the soil. Some of the questions that will be explored are: How is the way we relate to our and other bodies mirrored in the way we relate to land? How can local and foraged ingredients help us connect to both our bodies and the ecosystems we inhabit - and those that inhabit us - by redrawing our relationship with them? How are edible landscapes and edible bodies configured and how are they affected by human activities on the land that occupy, pollute, exploit and deplete? This session is an invitation to reach beyond the idea that well-being is a matter of individual health. Instead, it proposes healing as an all-encompassing act that requires us to feel beyond ourselves and to make space for complexity and diversity around us and within ourselves. Starting from the idea of foraging as a tool for social and ecological movement building, this session which forms part of the International Society of Ethnobiology 18th Congress and Harvest Festival wanted to explore a range of diverse foraging and land-based practices through a performative experience done in collaboration with the current cohort of Um Mami Melting Pot Morocco. We wanted to invite you to forage impressions of the land and plants and to reflect upon our perception of the continuum between what we perceive as a self and the whole. Through the engangement of all senses food was offered as a lense through which to see ourselves, memory and ways of relating to our bodies and those of others, whether human or more-than-human. Foraging requires us to be in right relationship to land, plants and each other, a right relationship that requires respect and reciprocity in the form of not overharvesting, not polluting and acknowledging the other. It enables healing in that it is an all-encompassing act that requires us to feel beyond the self and to make space for complexity and diversity around us and within ourselves.
We are what we eat
Performance
10.04.2024 21.04.2024
Marrakesh, Morocco.
ISE Congress (International Society of Ethnobiology Congress 2024)
Harvest Festival Marrakech 2024
Um Mami - Melting Pot Fonden (School of Kitchen)
Co-author → Francesca Castagnetti, Randa Toko.
Assistance → Abbouchi Charafdine, Alasfar Nihad, Ammi Hamza, Battoum Youssef, Chahmi Sofia, Dnijel Ayoub, El Menaouar Nizar, Elgarrab Yassine, Elghazi Fatima, Eliraqui Anass, Elomrani Zakaria, Erroudani Youssef, Ezzalmate Ayoub, Ighmour Soulaymane, Khairat Mourad, Laaroubi Mohammed, Lbhchich Hamed, Mendoubi Chaimaa, Oualkadi Youness, Oulad jia Hanaa, Rouchdi Mohamed, Sifat Hassan, Tasrih Ashraf, Tighladine Lahcen, Boutagui Halima.
Collaboration → Chef Simo Boudarbala, Marie-Sophie Grønlund.