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” [1]

What does it mean to feed oneself in a world that has made food itself a mechanism of control? How do we reclaim provision – as sustenance, as cultural memory, and as future possibility – in landscapes shaped by extraction and loss?

Reaching into the relations between history, ecology, and the power structures that determine which ways of living are allowed to continue, and which are severed, this project looks at memory and provision as inseparable entities. Grown, eaten, or named: all sustenance carries the weight of histories, of dispossession and of resilience.

ALIMENTARY LONGINGS is a multi-format programme centred around a residency, public engagements and ongoing research – 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. The programme began with a residency hosted by SAVVY Contemporary in Berlin, featuring curator Daniellis Hernandez Calderon and filmmaker Isma Gane. It continued with the co-organization of a Pan African Street Food Festival in St. Louis, Senegal (November 2024), in partnership with Group for Action and Critical Study (GAEC-Africa). The next chapter unfolds in Berlin on May 27 and 29, 2025, with a symposium which will be hosted between SAVVY Contemporary (May 27th) and in the sunny garden of LOBE Block (May 29th).

Inspired by Paulo Freire’s dialogical and participatory pedagogy, this project is a living framework, shaped through collective, continuous reflection and action. What is the role of art in the preservation and dissemination of traditional and ancestral knowledge systems and how might it help us in this case to look into food and food crops as disregarded media? How can we reframe food and food crops as overlooked mediums of cultural, economic and ecological significance?

INTERVENTIONS
In The Nutmeg’s Curse, Amitav Ghosh uses the history of nutmeg to illustrate the extent to which colonial violence was not simply content with the extraction of resources, but sought to achieve complete subjugation of the earth and soil.[2] The spices of the Banda Islands, the sugarcane of the Caribbean and the cotton of the American South all became instruments in the making of a global economy that dismembered existing ecologies and relations in the name of imperial conquest. Land was redefined as dead matter, passively awaiting exploitation.

The ecocidal effects of imperial conquest were not limited to the material world but spilled over to knowledge systems. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer stresses this point by reminding us that indigenous naming systems are living archives of reciprocity and the naming of plants in the spirit of kinship ingrains a reciprocal relationship of communion and trust.[3] Imperial interests, which demanded that plants were to be catalogued, harvested, and commodified, stripped away this intimacy and any sense of reciprocity. On the one hand, an interdependence that refuses the systems of monoculture, on the other, methods that treat land as a passive surface rather than as an active participant in the cycle of life.

Imperial logic won out. Today, there is a growing tendency to challenge the transactional and extractivist mode of relating to nature which is not only the dominant mode, but is in fact the defining quality of modern society. In the west, fantasies of a return to nature coupled with a bourgeois fetishism of an imagined indigeneity of relation are coming up against the core contradictions of modernity and the limits of neoliberalism. The imperial logic of yesterday persists today in a society that maintains its desacralised and instrumentalised relationship with the natural environment. If we accept Walter D. Mignolo’s suggestion that “there is no modernity without coloniality and that coloniality is constitutive, and not derivative, of modernity”,[4] how can we situate that understanding within the context of a city like Berlin? What do the attempts to interrupt the monologue of urban sprawl have to say to us?

Urban gardens that reclaim unlikely spaces exemplify the ambition of relational thinking. In Berlin, the community gardens Himmelbeet and ElisaBeet, green interruptions to the city’s concrete, are also reminders that soil and memory are intertwined. These gardens are planted in – and beside cemeteries – sites of remembrance, grief and growth – and provide spaces where provision and memory coexist in daily practice. Seed sharing and saving as part of their practice, defies corporate patents and state-imposed monocultures with the premise that it not only protects biodiversity, but also cultural lineage. These seeds and pollen are time capsules, embedded with knowledge about local climates, soils, frequencies from their surroundings, and histories of their adaptation to harsher climates. Léopold Sédar Senghor’s “rendezvous du donner et du recevoir”, of “giving and receiving”, underpins their practice. His philosophy of cultural exchange as mutual generosity mirrors the labour of gardeners who give to the soil and to one another without a guarantee of harvest.

At these cemeteries, physical spaces, junctions where the act of digging into soil comes with hope and grief alike, the concept of necropolitics articulated by Achille Mbembe, comes to mind. Cemeteries mark the societal boundary between life and death, between inclusion and exclusion and Mbembe’s argument that power is exercised through the capacity to dictate life and death is laid bare in these gardens.[5] Cultivating food in a cemetery circumvents the finality of death as a political tool and insists that life and death remain entangled, and the seams of this entanglement, however obscured, can never be completely hidden.

Community gardens and urban farming initiatives that have emerged in cities from Berlin to Cape Town do more than feed their communities – they attempt to rebuild disrupted relationships with land and reassemble fragmented histories of care and offer resistance to the architectures of food inequality. Yet, there exist many foundational contradictions – impossibilities which are deeply ingrained in the very dilemma that such endeavours set out to challenge or respond to. The cemetery is a liminal space, wherein the mysteries of life lurk preferably undisturbed. In Berlin, the cemetery is a calm and docile space, occupied by the occasional passerby or family member paying respects to their departed. It is a fixed plot of land, ruled by silence and often burdened by the enormous weight of a collective memory which must itself face constant excavation. They must now also contend with the urges of the living, who clamour for space – to live, to plant and to grow. 

The project Burb in Sweden expands on this by integrating children’s education and cemetery ecosystems, Burb's pedagogy acknowledges decay and renewal as part of the same cycle, which makes lessons in biodiversity in these spaces a beautiful shift from the perception of cemeteries from passive monuments to active spaces of life and learning.[6] This however should not obscure the fact that resourcefulness is often borne of austerity and lack. Cemeteries are liminal spaces in that they are representative of the margins between life and death, however they are also the margins to which the living are subjected in the face of capital driven urban expansion. In short, the living, who aspire to reconnect to the land, to productivity, to the soil, are sent to the cemeteries, wherein they must contend for it not just with the dead, but with each other.

Patterns emerge: memory and provision are inseparable, so how does provision move beyond memory into the necessary conditions for (our) future autonomy? If our provisions are to emerge from the soils within which our collective memories were also sowed, what should we reap when the sprouts surface? 

“(...) LET THE RAIN FALL OF ITS OWN ACCORD” – GOING BACK TO MOVE FORWARD

In The End of Nature, Bill McKibben argues that human activity has irreversibly altered nature and tipped the balance from interdependence to a confrontation with severe ecological consequences. In what is an otherwise dystopic narrative, McKibben concludes that he hopes for a time where the human impact that has gone as far as to shift weather patterns and the rhythms of seasons is minimised and we once again can “let the rain fall of its own accord”.[7] He hints at the dire need for our recalibration in a present that accepts ecological limits and relinquishes control – one where we cultivate systems that support, rather than dominate, the natural order of life and death.

In the presence of that hope and humility, we are reminded of the marine biologist and curator Ayana Elizabeth Johnson who asks “what if we get it right?“[8] Rather than outlining distant utopias, she focuses her book with the same title, on tangible, community-driven climate solutions that are already in practice. Johnson firmly believes that the lived experience serves as the bridge between our ecological reality and the human imagination and is aware of the crisis, but changes the sound of the alarm and suggests that the solution(s) are most likely rooted in actual lives – in the lived experience of coastal communities, urban farmers, seed savers, artists, all creating networks of resilience. Echoing Kimmerer, she rightly asks how we can begin to move toward ecological and cultural sustainability if we cannot imagine what the path feels like, and takes us one step further by way of art.

The artist Zina Saro-Wiwa’s work speaks to Johnson's core question as she looks through the lens of the oil palms of the Niger Delta in order to understand the journey that a crop goes through to transform from a source of indigenous sustenance into a global commodity. Her work proposes the oil palm as a first hand witness to histories of exploitation and endurance and imbued with a sense of agency reminiscent of Kimmerer and Gosh’s writings.

A thread gently connects across these examples, and it returns us to the Jamaican poet Olive Senior’s poem “Meditation on Yellow”: [8]

I want to feel
though you own
the silver tea service
the communion plate
you don’t own
the tropics anymore

The tropics that Gosh shows us were long a symbol of imperial appetite, of the alimentary longings of empire which are reclaimed in those lines. Reclaimed not just as geographical spaces, but also as metaphors for ongoing struggle and agency.

One aim of ALIMENTARY LONGINGS is to focus our ideas on how we imagine survival – not as isolated achievement, but as interdependence rooted in place. The seams show that the struggle for food security is beyond being a matter of mass need and production. It is about reconstructing (perhaps to some extent reverse engineering) the conditions for life to continue with dignity, reciprocity, and relation so we as participants in our food systems can remember our place within ecological and cultural cycles.