TAP, Christian Sleiman, Chady Rizk
Saturday 1 April 2023 |16:00 – 19:00| Beirut Art Center rooftop garden + walk through Jisr El Wati
The understanding of a community garden resonates in Beirut through the act of foraging: we find similarities in principles and practice when taking care of plants that end up belonging to a bigger community than ourselves. This is where the act of foraging comes in to replace the need to physically plant a space and, instead, offers the city as a community-garden that has been planted through deliberate and accidental human and natural actions. The remnants of green spaces that defy the concrete jungle in Beirut, tie together to provide a number of edible shrubs for the city’s inhabitants.
In the near impossibility to plant a garden in Beirut and tackling the questions around community and public, we want to focus on the possibility of a garden that exists in expanded time and space. In navigating notions of migration and displacement, we are asking our collaborators (Aterraterra, Reza Merabi, Maureen de Jong, Anastasis Sarakatsanos and Natascha Hagenbeek) as well as four cultural practitioners based in Beirut to share which seeds they would like to contribute to our community garden, the seeds that they would like to save for the end of the world, and a recipe that would carry their story alongside it. Our virtual community garden acts like a seedbank, existing through the narratives of those who are contributing to it.
16:00 – 17:00 | Foraging walk with Chady Rizk and Christian Sleiman
We assimilate foraging in Beirut to planting a community garden, in resonance with the event that is taking place in Palermo as part of the Dancing on the Edge Listening to Seeds public event. We are inviting participants to walk with us around Jisr El Wati and collect some of the edible shrubs that grow in the area, a result of arbitrary scattering of seeds. We want to highlight the projection of the commons in the act of foraging as it commands an equal share between the forager, their community, and the plant itself.
17:00 – 19:00 | Participatory culinary performance
Four cultural practitioners based in Beirut who have particular and diverse interests in food systems are invited to contribute to our virtual community seed bank and to prepare the recipes that would accompany the seeds they wish to leave for the apocalyptic situation we are envisioning.
Image: Christian Sleiman
