The opening event of the 11th edition of Harvest Festival Marrakech, مهرجان الحصاد فمراكش , is hosted with our long term partners Um Mami by Melting Pot at their home in Sidi Ghnem.

We will be joined virtually by Salma Serry, founder of Sufra Archive who will led us through a performative lecture titled Reading the North African Colonial Agricultural Archive.

A food archive begins before the recipe. It begins with land, seed, water, labour, mills, markets, and the systems that determine what can be grown, circulated, and eaten. This lecture-performance turns to the colonial agricultural archive of North Africa as a record of those conditions: of extraction, control, dispossession, infrastructure, and the reshaping of everyday food life. Through archival material, film and sound, the lecture approaches these records as material to be reclaimed and critically engaged with. It looks at how colonial archives can be used to understand the violence they helped normalize, to invert the narratives they were built to sustain, and to recover histories that sit inside them but were never centered.

The work draws in part on Salma Serry’s doctoral research on agriculture in Egypt, alongside Sufra Archive’s ongoing attention to the printed life of food and agriculture across SWANA.Following the event we will enjoy a celebratory feast prepared by Um Mami and have the opportunity to engage further around the ideas provoked by Salma’s performance lecture.

Language: The discussion will be in English, In our commitment to making our events accessible to all,some whispering translation to Darija can be available from the Harvest team with prior warning.