Chewing with Political Teeth

Constituting two sides of the same coin, famine and hunger strikes render the digestive system another political site of struggle. While famines are a top-down force often engineered by governments to subordinate their people, hunger strikes are a bottom-up form of individual resistance often undertaken by political prisoners as a last resort for claiming their rights.

The question of preservation is foregrounded in this piece, feeding into the notion of food security, the domestic, the public, and the political. Who is able to preserve food beyond its season? Why do we preserve food? Is preservation a result of surplus or is preservation a fear-taming method? 

Informed by Lebanon's long-standing practice of mulberry farming, this piece uses mulberry fruit leather as a means of memorializing the Great Famine of Mount Lebanon. Prior to the famine (1915-1918), mulberry trees covered 80% of Mount Lebanon’s terraces, which resulted in the emergence of monoculture silk farming and the accumulation of increasing debt on the part of peasants seeking to keep up with the capitalist trade of silk in Europe, particularly in France. Due to the lack of cultivation of other crops (e.g. lentils and burghul), the blockade imposed by Allied forces during WWI resulted in a famine that killed more than 200,000 people. For the next twenty years, post-famine Lebanon was placed under the French Mandate.

"Chewing with Political Teeth" , Fruit leather aprons - installation view at Garage Rotterdam | Photo by Aad Hoogendoorn

Criticizing the omnipresent notion in the West that famines are a thing of the past, this project provides a visual translation of the direct and indirect relationship between politics and war, on the one hand, and the digestive system, on the other. With the ongoing famine in Yemen (circa 2016), increasing effects of climate change, a neocolonial strategy of sanctions whose only victims are peoples (instead of governments) across the Global South, and the current outcome of Russia’s war against Ukraine (inflation and insufficient global supply of wheat in particular) we are witnessing the crucial role that food security will play in both the present and the future.