What if an exhibition could be planted rather than installed?
What if images, stories, recipes and conversations could scatter themselves across a digital landscape like seeds—some visible, some hiding close to the ground, waiting for the right conditions to be noticed?
Food, Seeds and Solidarity gathers practices of growing, cooking, remembering and sharing around food as a commons.
Here, food is never simply something on a plate. It connects us to land, water, labour, migration, memory and politics; it is a living archive of where we come from and how we have learned to survive. Seeds, too, are more than botanical matter. They travel with people, cross borders, disappear into pockets and suitcases, are exchanged, protected, saved and replanted. A seed can carry a landscape with it.
The exhibition moves through the work of Broudou School as a mobile food commons—a travelling kitchen, temporary shelter and space of encounter where knowledge is gathered by walking, listening, cooking, tasting and making together.
There are recipes here, but they refuse to behave like instructions. They are closer to living documents—changing as they travel, absorbing new ingredients, memories and circumstances. Food for Thought, initiated by Al Mouhit in Tunis, brings together dishes shaped by journeys between Italy, Palestine, Libya, Thailand and Tunisia, asking what happens to a recipe when it migrates. A dish can become a map; a meal, a history lesson; a kitchen, an archive.
Elsewhere, the humble spontaneous plant makes an appearance. The plants we might call weeds (or simply fail to notice) begin to look different when we slow down. They grow where they are not expected, resisting our neat ideas of what belongs and what should be controlled. The idea of “resistance plants” emerged through this encounter, even imagining wild plants transformed into colourful sweets: falfoul, perhaps, as a small edible rebellion.
Seeds similarly resist disappearance. Seed Season brought together conversations around food sovereignty, diasporic seeds, community seed saving and the rights to seeds. To preserve a seed is not only to store it. A living seed must be planted, cared for, exchanged and allowed to continue.
The urgency of these questions becomes especially palpable in relation to Palestine and Lebanon, where food, land and sovereignty are inseparable from histories of dispossession, ecological destruction, displacement and survival. Here, saving a seed can become an act of continuity; growing, cooking and sharing can become forms of care and resistance.
The exhibition itself follows this logic. Its fragments are dispersed rather than neatly arranged: photographs, conversations, recipes, plants and reflections appear across the page, asking the visitor to pause, wander and make connections. This density is deliberate. Knowledge, like food, is something to be passed hand to hand, mouth to mouth, person to person.
So stay a little longer.
Read another story.
Follow a seed.
Imagine a flavour that might disappear.
Notice the plant growing at the edge of the path.
Perhaps pick up a recipe.
Perhaps pass it on.
Something might take root.