food sovereignty

In this podcast, Filmmaker, urbanist, educator, and cultural practitioner Tareq Khalaf opens a conversation on the agrarian ways of life and the deep-rooted significance of land in Palestinian identity. He reflects on memory, absences, legacies, collective labor, fig harvests, resistance, and radical pedagogies. The conversation also examines the insidious strategies of slow violence at the heart of the settler-colonial project, revealing occupation and its spatial regime—shaped by fragmentation, land confiscation, settlement expansion, conservation policies, and food politics—as a form of environmental erosion and disaster. We also delve into the emotional and psychological toll of life under occupation, and the vital role of imagination, community, and collective expression in sustaining identity and hope, especially in the face of efforts to normalize deeply abnormal conditions.

In this podcast, Palestinian artist Mirna Bamieh thinks aloud through disappearance: of dishes, of access to land and sea, of routes between Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza. She lingers on fermentation and preservation as slow, stubborn forms of survival in times of genocide and exile, on pantries that prepare for emergency, on doors and foodways as thresholds between worlds. She speaks of immigrants’ suitcases lined with Zaatar, olive oil, and citrus, of how cooking can make a scattered life legible, and of how stories travel through potatoes passed from hand to hand in the street. Here, recipes become maps and memories, jars become time capsules, and the everyday choreography of hands in the kitchen opens a space where grief, rage, and tenderness ferment together into something that insists on remaining alive, visible, and shared.