October 2025: Art, Food, and Impending Doom
The things we think about when we're not picking fruit
*As I wrote this, I recorded the sound of the Israeli drone from my window - it’s been buzzing very loudly over Beirut since yesterday*
I went to a panel at L.A.U.1 last week on “Food as Art, Memory and Resistance” co-hosted by the university’s Department of Nutrition and Food Science and the Institute of Art in the Arab World (IAAW). It was just the beginning of what I hope will become a series that deconstructs the intersection of food, art, and politics.
Christine Abi Azar of No Chef in the Kitchen, one of the panelists, said, “food is the only art medium that goes inside you.” I understand that we don’t have to mean food in the literal sense but, with tablescapes and buffets that resemble installations and the same abundance captured and paraded on socials, food has increasingly become the actual medium too. In “Surreal suppers: the artists playing with their food,” Laila Gohar is quoted saying, “the creation of art and the creation of food are both nourishing acts” as the article explores the pitfalls of intellectualizing sustenance and/or using it as a means to an end that doesn’t involve any actual eating.
Dr. Yasmine Nachabe Taan, IAAW director and design professor, took a moment to acknowledge those starving due to Israel’s imposed starvation of Palestinians in Gaza by using a Moustafa Farroukh painting of women cooking stones in a cauldron, alluding to the Great Famine of Mount Lebanon in 1915. How does art record our humanity—or lack thereof? Must art always be pleasing to the eye and heart? The gut?
The questions folded into the dough of the region’s geopolitical puppeteering have been on loop: What is the role of the artist? What is the role of the writer? What is my role? How can I be useful? What can I do with the skills I have?
We’re all circling around the same thing: Where is my power?
My frustration with these questions (that I’m also asking myself) is the answers. It’s deflating and disheartening to realize record keeping doesn’t stop the acts you’re recording from happening. Documenting feels passive. You’re on the sidelines taking notes after-the-fact. How does that dam the damned from flooding all our lands?
Last Friday, Mo Amer performed his latest comedy hour here in a weird cloaked hangar in Sin el Fil. He mentioned how his TV series, Mo, is more of a personal archive. “The cutaways are real, that’s Palestine” referring to the landscape shots of his village of Burin at the end of Season Two. He explained that, no matter how hard Israel will try to erase it, his story exists for the world. His show, or his art, breathes life into Burin and that matters.
I’ve just finished my own film on Israel’s demolition of my village so this bit stayed with me. I’m sitting with the second part of the equation that I didn’t allow myself to think about while editing. Now, I must decide what to do with this film which was my own self-inflicted exposure therapy. I lived within my footage and emotions for months. I have to ask myself if I want to share this with the public. (Yes.) It doesn’t feel complete yet and upon sharing this revelation and the film with another new artist-friend, he put it plainly. This work will not feel done until it is witnessed.
I guess it’s appropriate that this film is wrapping up around the same time that I finished Words of the South in 2023. This year’s olive harvest in Lebanon started (early) at the end of September. A few weeks later, the bright green liquid started flowing on Italian Instagram accounts. The Mediterranean is awash in it but those along our southern border now have to get permits from outsiders2 to go crush what little is left on the few trees they might still have.
This month’s harvest moon was the first of three consecutive supermoons to close out the year. A reel from Kate Forster came up on my IG explore page where she talks about how this has not been a year of thriving, but a temporary cocoon phase. “We’re all compost right now” she says and advises to seek out microanchors (or small pleasures) to make it through.
advises to create dangerously. When I look at what Israel is still doing to everyone in the neighborhood, I don’t think we have a choice.POPCORN IN MY TEETH
The House is a stop-motion anthology on Netflix that I finally got around to watching after it being on my list for ages. It’s three separate stories with the house being the throughline. This reviewer isn’t a big fan but I loved this paragraph she wrote in The Guardian:
“In the interests of full disclosure, I am firmly in the camp of those who find stop-motion animation quite spooky enough without adding intentional frights. The slight herky-jerky nature of the movement is a constant reminder of the endless unseen positioning and repositioning that goes on. It speaks to my darkest terror – that we have no free will at all and are indeed just playthings to unseen gods, posing us here, there and everywhere for nothing more than their sport. We’re all just puppets, d’you see? Puppets with illusory notions of freedom and independence. Do you see yet? Do you see?”
It’s strange ride which is totally worth watching during this spooky season, even purely in terms of craft. Also, selfishly need to talk about it with someone!
AT LEAST 10 LITTLE LINKS
“The City Speaks:Visual solidarity and Palestinian resistance in Barcelona” by Lizzie Reid for Shado Mag
Artist Ai Weiwei was commissioned by a German newspaper to write an article. They refused to publish it so Hyperallergic did instead.
“I understand now: People crave power and tyranny as they crave sunshine and rain, for the burden of self-awareness feels like pain. At times, even like catastrophe.”
- Ai Weiwei in “What I Wish I Had Known About Germany Earlier“
Lots of good stuff in the Design of Horror series from Design Observer including “Mirror, mirror: The rise of ‘beauty horror’ amid today’s antifeminist backlash” by Delaney Rebernik
“Every Artist in an Unhappy Lover” from
Witchy vibes have definitely seeped into music this season. I just found Paris Paloma. I’m thrilled that Florence + The Machine is SO back and Tame Impala’s got a track called Dracula that sounds very...Tame Impala (complimentary). YouTube showed me related tracks and I need someone else to weigh in on this song, Burn Your Village, from two years ago. Doesn’t it sound like Asmahan’s Ya Habibi Taala? The Last Dinner Party published a gorgeous music video for their track, The Scythe, and it gets under my skin with every watch:
“I finally refuse to be unhappy; and I will always fight against my very dangerous tendency to fall into despair and sadness and depression — it happens often to me but still I refuse it.”
- Letter from Helen Khal to Chafik Abboud, 1974 on view at Sursock Museum until June 20, 2027
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Lebanese American University
Israel via UNIFIL