A wall-gecko watched us as we drank. “Look at that wall-gecko, Dad.”
“Don’t mind it,” he said without looking. “It’s our friend, watching over us.”
The pepper soup was hotter than usual and I kept blowing to cool its fire.
—Ben Okri, The Famished Road
There are many stories of an inexpensive substance named “soup.” Sold by French street vendors in the 16th century, soup was a potent antidote to physical exhaustion, prescribed to restore strength and health (the word restaurant derives from here, and the French restaurer). There’s another tale of a Portuguese soup made with stones (Sopa da Pedra) in which hungry travellers, carrying nothing more than a cooking pot and a stone, convinced townspeople to share small amounts of food to make a communal meal. A material crossing our bodies, soup is a carrier of histories, remedies, and memories that transmit a sense of identity and belonging. But, the act of combining and mixing different elements often risks homogenisation—of ingredients merging into an awkward “melting pot.” When people and places enter in contact, how do they maintain singularity? Can they flow and interact without losing their distinct identities? And what are their underflavours?
Spanning geographies and media, this exhibition is an amalgam of syncretic encounters. With a poetic approach, each work challenges the stereotypes and expectations of people and places, inviting reflections on how we find roots in various contexts. Drawing from personal narratives, each artist deploys visual means to capture sensory experiences of living between cultures, moving from Arab, Asian and East African regions, Latin America, and the Caribbean to Southern Europe. By reimagining everyday architectures and landscapes and observing the interlacing of vegetal and urban spaces, the artists explore migratory narratives and diasporic experiences of the everyday.
Through a practice that is research-based and emotion-oriented, Rebecca Moccia investigates the sensory relationship between physical and social spaces. A series of works responding to the space of Madragoa uncover temperatures, atmospheres, and affective states. Thermal photographs—cut and woven together into small tapestries in collaboration with members of San Patrignano Community Centre—capture the heat of mountain landscapes in Italy. The blue-back paper, commonly used for billboards and here ripped off the gallery walls, points to the shadows of the building at a specific time of the day. The photograph of a building roof holds the Italian word “Coraggio“—meaning courage. A slogan tagged onto a rainy rooftop in Milan, it is only visible via aerial view. Intended as a form of grounding, the work expresses intimate messages despite its public dimensions. Small microphones hang from the ceiling but cannot be used. Instead, they are glazed through the Raku technique, usually employed to make ceremonial cups, which involves burning a glaze. By playing with the language of materials, and confusing the normal function of objects, Moccia reshuffles our senses. The works invite us to re-attune ourselves to the surrounding space, and find other ways to move through the structures that shape our reality.
In Lydia Ourahmane’s installation, minimalistic gestures become a poetic means to retrace family origins and map her identity across time. Having lived between places since emigrating from Algeria to the UK as a girl, Ourahmane looks at her maternal family lineage for the first time in her research-based practice. Two plates on the wall bear the Chinese inscription “Clear and Magnificent” [清晰壯麗]. What remains of this legacy are things of no particular value. Treated as readymades and hung on the wall, these simple objects become icons of complex personal histories, once circulating in the Chinese restaurant her grandfather eventually lost to bankruptcy. In diasporic experiences, ephemera is often accompanied by a sense of belonging but also by disconnection and remoteness. Despite the transience of their economy, these empty dishes, once vessels for prosperity, evoke a gustatory memory, told in the stories of others.
References to food, cityscapes, and social histories are hand-woven in Alia Farid’s tapestries. In the first chapter of an ongoing research project, which traces waves of migration from South Asia and the Arab countries to Latin America and the Caribbean, Farid observes buildings, adverts, and shops. These include pharmacies and restaurants in Puerto Rico, conjuring the presence of the Palestinian diaspora locally. Emerging from this series, the tapestry El Menú II presents dishes labelled as “Comida Arabe” (Spanish for “Arab food”). Included is the Puerto Rican Mofongo—a local plantain dish—as well as Italian and other cross-continental recipes. These “dishes of the day“ are prepared in an Arab-owned restaurant called El Nilo. This mixture of culinary traces, alongside brightly coloured cityscapes, places of worship, and other architectural motives, shows how people, habits, and traditions converge, without merging completely. Drawing from photographs, archival material, local interviews, and the culture of fat weaving in the Arabic-speaking world, Farid exposes the traces of migrations embedded in daily life, showing their power as a conduit for community and collective identity.
Shifting the tradition of landscape painting to urban sites, Farida El Gazzar explores collective and personal experiences in a series of works on paper. The images in antique frames show architectural and landscape details from Athens, where the artist lives, and Cairo, which speaks to her Egyptian roots. El Gazzar began developing these formats during the pandemic while walking and contemplating her immediate surroundings and neighbourhoods. The walks became a form of travelling and reconnecting to faraway familiar places. Depictions of unfinished brutalist buildings and houses built close to already-existing structures allow reflections on land use and its mismanagement. In other paintings, she captures palms and citrus trees, redirecting us to another form of growth and expansion. She also paints the moon as a symbol of something shared, under which we have singular life paths and experiences. Combining stories of urban development with the symbolism of gardens and mystical places, El Gazzar creates pockets of spaces rooted in the everyday to tune in with one’s thoughts, to get lost in what is hidden and unknown.
In Vashish Soobah’s video and photographs, silent actors in colonial legacies, such as the Indian Ocean and sugarcane plantations of Mauritius, alongside family narratives, become means to retrace identity. Raised in Italy by Mauritian parents, Soobah considers the island landscape a physical and existential space through which to navigate his roots. The silent video Différent vagues mais mêmes ocean, vol 3 explores the theme of voyage, and the return to home. Poems by Derek Walcott accompany shots of the beaches, empty interiors, and plantations where Soobah’s grandmother worked. The shaky movement of the camera recalls the waves of an ocean and the wind passing through fields, evoking both instability and a sense of meditation. Close ups of leaves carrying fire on water and other rituals uncover the importance of spiritual practices. The ocean, an ancient mixture, carries a chance for healing and reconnection. In his video, Soobah cites Walcott’s Love after Love poem, an ode to returning home to oneself:
The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door,
in your own mirror,
and each will smile at each other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
Curated by
Giulia Civardi
at Madragoa, Lisboa
until January 11, 2025
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