Editors’ Picks: Yolande Zola Zoli van der Heide

I’m currently sitting with artist and somatic practitioner Camille Sapara Barton’s offering that social movements need to approach lasting change through the lens of fermentation.11.Camille Sapara Barton shared a summary of this message on Instagram, 12 June 2024, instagram.com; an elaborated version of can be found in her recent book Tending Grief (2024), camillesaparabarton.com. It is a proposal to balance the ‘veracious fire’ response to the multiple genocides and uncertainties we are witnessing and organising around. This slow accumulative process is one that can shift culture in building skills such as changing shape along with the change enacted. New realities might then not resemble those of old oppressive modes. Social movements, Barton points out, need to operate in multiple modes to enact this kind of intergenerational and systemic change.

The idea of fermentation brings me to the idea of the Kitchen, and how it shapes conversation so I revisited a discussion that took place in The Kitchen of Subversive Film, who have given this name to their collective working space in Brussels. In conversation, artists Reem Shilleh and Mohanad Yaqubi share how the roots of Palestinian militant cinema can be traced back to 1968 in a kitchen apartment in Amman, Jordan, where a Palestinian revolutionary body had been organising.

To mitigate the kind of balance that Barton advises, veracious fire must also be supplemented with grief practices, rest and healing. A reprint of bell hooks’s ‘Touching the Earth’ can be found in the 2022 book Climate: Our Right to Breathe. In it, hooks underscores how collective black self-recovery is only feasible with the renewal of our relationship to the Earth and recalls how generations of Black enslaved Americans migrated north to escape life in the South only to return home ‘in search of spiritual nourishment, a healing that was fundamentally connected to reaffirming one’s connection to nature, to a contemplative life where one could take time, sit on the porch, walk, fish, and catch lightning bugs. …[so] when we talk about healing that psyche we must also speak about restoring our connection to the natural world’.22.bell hooks, ‘Touching the Earth’, in Climate: Our Right to Breathe, ed. Hiuwai Chu et al., Berlin: K Verlag and L‘Internationale Online, 2022, 340.

Running with Barton’s metaphor, fermentation practice is situated in that one’s culture can literally be preserved in a culture or fermentation starter. In ‘The Poetics of Entanglement: Zina Saro-Wiwa’s Food Interventions’, art historian and artist Nomusa Makhubu speaks to the connections between food and power, as well as land and labour relations. ‘The global traffic of food sustains static conceptions of, for example, “Chinese,” “Mexican,” “Indian,” or “African” food. These cuisines can be produced and consumed almost anywhere, but, in this traffic, there are vestiges of relations forged by imperialism. So, while food seems to solidify class and culture differences, it also fosters collective ways of being and embodies human commonalities in entangled histories; it has the potential to tap into the persistent emotive histories of the colonized body in contemporary social life.’33.Nomasu Makhubu, ‘The Poetics of Entanglement: Zina Saro-Wiwa’s Food Interventions’, in Climate: Our Right to Breathe, ed. Hiuwai Chu et al., Berlin: K Verlag and L‘Internationale Online, 2022, 165.

In urgent responses and moments of learned slowness, part of the task then is to be attuned with the collective and individual heart, mind, body and gut.

Yolande Zola Zoli van der Heide is senior exhibitions curator at Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the Netherlands.

Nick Aikens and Subversive Film, ‘The Kitchen, an Introduction to Subversive Film with Nick Aikens, Reem Shilleh and Mohanad Yaqubi’, 2023

bell hooks, ‘Touching the Earth’, Climate: Our Right to Breathe, 2022

Nomusa Makhubu, ‘The Poetics of Entanglement: Zina Saro-Wiwa’s Food Interventions’, Climate: Our Right to Breathe, 2022