Edible Bodies, Edible Landscapes
18 May, Edible Bodies, Edible Landscapes, Francesca Melina et al., Um Mami Melting Pot, Targa, 9.30am to 11.30am*** Intimate event, 8 spaces available for Harvest attendees via Eventbrite Registration
This event will be delivered in English with some translation available if needed in French or Darija.
Beyond Ethnobotanical Knowledge: The Contribution of Foraging to Healing and Socio-Ecological Change.
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 will explore a range of diverse foraging and land-based practices, followed by a performance-lecture involving collective food making and tasting with the current cohort of Um Mami Melting Pot Morocco and a intimate group of Congress and Harvest Festival participants. Each participant will be invited to taste and feel not just through but on their own bodies to simultaneously explore our perception of, and relationship to our bodies, food and, by reflection, the land. Starting from this loose structure, and with the wish to create a temporary community and democratic space for collective making, contributors and participants alike will be invited to give shape to this performance-lecture as it unfolds, as the result of a meeting of people, plants and the land at a specific time and space.
“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.”
In collaboration with Harvest festival and the Congress organising committee, the collective of artists, activists, fermentation explorers that form Edible Landscapes, Edible Bodies will lead 2 sessions, one online and one in person at Farm Slimane, exploring the contexts they centre in their session. This exchange will facilitate a transmission of the knowledge they wish to impart through their session to be embedded within the local context and with emerging food practitioners.
