Mirna Bamieh
Mirna Bamieh is a Palestinian artist and chef currently based in Lisbon, Portugal. Her practice explores the politics of disappearance and memory production by unpacking the social concerns and limitations of Palestinian communities amid contemporary political dilemmas. Recently, she has been reflecting on the process of fermentation through text, ceramics and videos, incorporated into site-specific installations.
Can you tell me more about your project Palestine Hosting Society?
Palestine Hosting Society is a live art project that explores traditional food culture in Palestine, with a specific focus on culinary practices on the verge of disappearing. Through dinner tables, talks, walks, and various interventions, ancient dishes and traditions are highlighted and shared communally. The project began as a large dinner performance for 65 people, all gathered around a table where food was served with a ceramic series I specifically made for the occasion. I crafted each ceramic piece intending for it to communicate the concept of sharing, as well as the intrinsic stories of the food it contained.
My last dinner performance was titled “The Tongue Tracing, the Hand Tracing the Earth.” It was about the hands tracing the ceramics to leave a negative space on the piece. These tracings would serve as memories of my hand’s grasp on the clay. For instance, instead of having a handle on the pot’s lid, I created one imprinting a negative space of my hand grabbing the ceramic lid. The hand’s negative space became the handler, eternally imprinted onto the same ceramic piece people will be eating my food from. In this way, there’s also the taste of the cook’s hands left in the food. Traces are ever-present in my performances.
The Palestine Hosting Society has always been for me a celebration of the sharing that organically happens through food; its research has led me to meet music composers working on the dinner’s soundscapes, local food-carriers, as well as people working behind inspiring institutions. Despite the project's intensity, my commitment to sharing and celebrating Palestine allowed me to cherish every moment of it, including the physical and mental efforts I was putting in.
How did this fascination with hands begin? What sparked it?
Hands are a very important source of inspiration for me; a fascination that has consistently been present in my work. My dad was a painter before he became a doctor, running his own hospitals in Jerusalem and Ramallah. Art has always been present in our house and it has played a major role in the construction of my identity. My dad didn’t care if my siblings and I were at the top of our class. Instead, he celebrated us when we made drawings as gifts. The very first pieces I made for an audience outside of my friends and family, were a series of intricately detailed ink drawings of hands. It took hours to make a single one. In each image, the hands were creating and negotiating their existence through gestures. Now, looking back, I can see how hands were a metaphor for the deeper existential processing I was going through. Hands speak to me about power, not only one you have control over, but one you often can’t control. Somehow those hands felt like the hands of God - the hands of a divine intervention. Sometimes, they felt like the hands of those deep feelings that take over us. This was and still is the lexicon I use when I speak about my hands, and it has been consistent for as long as I remember.
When did ceramics come into your practice?
Everything that comes to me in my work is part of a journey. I’ll start something because it interests me and then suddenly it takes over. I was previously teaching Visual Arts at Bethlehem University. I used to spend a lot of time throwing on the wheel in their wonderful ceramic studios. At some point, the desire of creating a dinner performance where the ceramic vessels were part of the meal, and the aspect of sharing was reflected through the designs I made, came to me. I didn't think I was a strong enough ceramicist to do it. However, I relied on my strong will power to ultimately pull off this production. During the making of these pieces, I fell in love with hand-built ceramics, mainly because of the individuality of each piece, but also because this technique allowed me to be more in control of my hands than working on a wheel did. As an artist, I feel stronger controlling forms with my hands without adding the movement of the wheel, and with my hands having direct contact with the clay.
The same curiosity-led process happened with food. I was struggling with the art world and needed a break from it. My love for food was just as strong as my love for art, and while taking some space, food naturally became my dedicated practice. I was in Japan at that time, pursuing food studies based on sheer curiosity. While becoming interested in hospitality and cooking professionally,
I also realised that we, the current generation of Palestinians, were not taught so many things about our land. Somehow, so much culinary knowledge was getting lost and failed to reach our generation: the dishes, the names of the dishes, the practices, the stories. This realisation took over my art and still informs my current practice.
Can you tell me more about your project Sour Things?
Sour Things is a large project, composed of different installations, workshops, and exhibitions, where I am processing the feeling of sourness. The project explores sourness not only as a bitter feeling but also as a rich taste that can exalt or impair flavour. Stemming from the expression “I feel sour”, I observed it in connection with our bodies, our touch and specifically our hands. For example, when you’re not feeling good and you bake a loaf of bread, it most likely won't turn out the best. There’s a lot of alchemy happening when you’re cooking and that sourness is mediated through your hands. When you're sour, your touch becomes sour, and that's what my sour hands are processing and communicating.
In the installation Sour Things: The Kitchen, a group of ceramic hands are disseminated amongst the mess of the kitchen. They were grabbing spices, had dried salt on top of them, and were drying on dish racks as if someone had been washing them and putting them aside. The hands work as a bundle on the kitchen counter. They act as the shadow cast by whoever was doing those actions and interventions in the kitchen. I see those ceramic hands as that person’s outbound. In a way, they are me in the kitchen when I’m not there. Together with the hands, there’s also quite a large community of fingers, forty of them to be precise, all doing their thing: squeezing lemons, grasping onto food, touching plates.
How does research come in when you work with communities?
For me, research is always present. It is a matter of how I incorporate it into my practice.
I'm currently working on a new project called Bitter Things. I was working on bitter oranges with La Fresnedilla, a creative collective in Spain. Our goal was to salvage the bitter oranges in an effort to bring their traditional usage back and involve the local community. We made hundreds of litres of juice as well as jars of marmalade. I was cooking my grandma’s marmalade recipe while somebody else was cooking their mother’s recipe from Cordoba. It felt very organic to suddenly find each other exchanging recipes.
We processed over 300 kilos of bitter oranges, extracted their juice, and made it into concentrate by cooking it slowly in sugar. This concentrate can be preserved for years thanks to its sugar, and can be enjoyed in sparkling or natural water. It’s a beautiful drink because of the tangy taste of the fruit and the added orange blossoms. Unfortunately, most people have forgotten this recipe. Because this heirloom citrus is quite demanding and time-consuming in its preparation, people are less inclined to dedicate time and care to its preservation. Nevertheless, the community we were involved with loved this drink, and we collectively spoke about how this fruit can once again be appreciated instead of thrown into the garbage every season.
From this experience in Spain, I have realised that every time I bring my own knowledge to a space, that space also has its own knowledge to host mine. I’ve learned about the history of citrus fruits in Cordoba, learned other people’s family recipes for bitter oranges’, and have shared my grandma’s recipe from Palestine. Sharing recipes is always a conversation, and that's the beauty of working with food. Sharing sets the tone, and transforms each person's knowledge into a give and take framed by learning. Food has an intrinsic generosity to it that motivates me to visit different cultures, cook for them, and have them cook for me. Food is a language bigger than us all, one without borders. It’s a language of generosity. This is why I love it. It gives me strength and empowers me.
Crafting recipes has always been the work of many people, of many hands, a collective work often overlooked or taken for granted. Do you think of hands as agency owners that can bring something to life?
Yes, we often forget that recipes are story creators as much as story carriers. When you cook a dish, it becomes part of a bigger story about the who, when, and where. When someone else takes that recipe, it becomes part of their story and their memory as well. Since we were kids, we have used food as building blocks for our memories and identity construction. When we cook, we are creating memories for both ourselves and the others we are cooking for or with. Such memories inscribe themselves in the brain differently from other sensorial experiences we go through. Memory around food is both physical and mental. It goes beyond the remembrance of a taste and becomes a feeling that involves both the senses and the emotions. My memories around food are deeply inscribed in my subconscious, yet, I cannot fully grasp them. Even though they are so powerful, their appearance is so sudden that it doesn't allow me to fully grasp them. Sometimes I find this quite frustrating.
Sometimes you have to make peace with the ineffability of certain memories, especially when they also belong to other people's stories. It's not a loss, but an addition onto a never-ending lineage of recipe development and creation. I know I couldn’t perfectly replicate my grandma’s favourite dish, even though its taste and smell are in my subconscious, and I need to make peace with that.
This reminds me of how individual the act of cooking is. In Arabic we have a name for it: nafas. It translates into soul and breath at the same time. Each cook has their own nafas, a personal breath that comes through their souls which is left on the food. When we want to compliment a great cook, we say they have a good nafas. I like this concept because it is mediated, again, through the hands. The hands’ is in the food, it's like a thumb-print, unique to each one, and is the result of the bacteria on your fingers. This exchange enhances the connection between your body and what lives on it, and once again hands are the passage-gates for those organisms to interact with their surroundings.
Yes! The whole concept of Mano a Mano begins precisely from this: we have hands to taste, remember, observe. It is about going beyond standard touch and becoming aware of the opportunities we are given and we can grasp, physically and metaphorically. What advice would you give to people who want to engage more with their hands?
To not overthink. Every time I retrospectively look at the dinner performances and installations I’ve been doing, I pat myself on the back for having had the will and courage to not overthink it, but instead trust the process and move forward without overcomplicating it. It is also important to ask yourself what it is that you want to say or add to the world - and then go for it. Don’t compromise too much, don't contaminate your will by overthinking it, simply go for it. There's a lot of power and earnestness in making. Creativity is bigger than us, we’re just a vessel for it to come into the world. This is why sometimes, it is only while we are making that we’re able to understand what we want to say. Just moving forward is a win for me, as sometimes what I want to say is bigger than everything I could ever only think of, but rarely smaller than what I do.
All images are courtesy of Mirna, intervew led and faciliated by Viviana Calvagno.
