ALIMENTARY LONGINGS. 
The seams between memory and provision

in exchange for a string of islands
and two continents
you gave us a string of beads
and some hawk’s bells

Olive Senior, “Meditation on Yellow”

How do we feed ourselves in a world where food has become a mechanism of control? How do we reclaim sustenance – as cultural memory, as future possibility – in landscapes marked by extraction and erasure?

ALIMENTARY LONGINGS is a public programme exploring food, farming, land reclamation, drink, and spirituality as sites of resistance and reconnection. Through dialogues, workshops, and communal practices, we interrogate the entangled histories of ecology, colonialism, and survival – asking how provision can be both an act of remembrance and a strategy for autonomy.

Impulses
Colonial Appetites: From the nutmeg wars of the Banda Islands to the sugarcane fields of the Caribbean, food crops have been instruments of empire. We examine how imperial logic transformed land into inert matter and severed relationships of reciprocity.

Seeds as Time Capsules: Urban gardens like Berlin’s Himmelbeet and ElisaBeet defy monoculture by saving seeds – preserving biodiversity and cultural lineage in soil once meant for graves. What does it mean to grow food in cemeteries, where life and death, memory and sustenance, are intertwined? Can we reimagine cemeteries as classrooms for decay and renewal? Can we confront the reality that scarcity still forces the living to compete with the dead for land. The fantasy of "returning to nature" is a fraught one. Colonialism did not merely extract resources – it severed entire ecosystems from their cultural and spiritual contexts, rendering land terra nullius: empty, inert, and ripe for domination. Today, as climate collapse accelerates, the impulse to "restore" what was lost often clashes with the irreversible realities of modernity.

This iteration of Alimentary Longings brings together ancestral wisdom, land reclamation struggles, and the spirits that animate our food and drink. Alongside Emeka Ogboh, Zina Saro-Wiwa and Kathleen Bomani, we meditate on the movements of gin and trace the footsteps of its ingredients along colonial trade routes. Along the way, we might encounter gin’s cognate, the djinn – Sacred spirits, commodified substances and the capture of people. What are these lesser-known histories of the gin/djinn’s migration? 

Alongside this, Yvonne Phillis of The Forge (Johannesburg), will share insights on South African farmers' efforts to reclaim stolen land, while Theodora Pius from MVIWATA (Tanzania’s small-scale farmers’ movement) will discuss grassroots resistance to industrial agriculture. These dialogues will unfold through culinary and beverage interventions that engage the politics of taste and alongside performances that evoke the many tensions between tradition, modernity and extraction.

We invite you to a full-day programme planted by SAVVY Contemporary in the beautiful garden at LOBE Block on May 29th, the day of the feast of Ascension, as we gather to confront some of these contradictions. Through acts of breaking bread, listening to music, performances, and discussions, the program will aim to answer core questions such as: How do we nourish ourselves in systems built to starve us? Can food sovereignty exist within cities built on colonial wealth? How do the excesses of the imperial core impact the possibilities of sovereignty in the global south? How do we honor grief while planting futures? When survival depends on interdependence, how do we relearn reciprocity?