The Taste of Displacement

The Taste of Displacement is a feminist intervention exploring radical hospitality, food practices, and the intimacy of “doing-cooking” (a term borrowed from the French phenomenologist Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life: Living and Cooking, 1998). By staging dinner performances and implementing various interventions rooted in food practices — as well as the transmission of recipes across generations — the project emphasizes the gendered labor of love and the preservation of culinary heritage at risk of fading away.

The inaugural event in a series of ongoing multi-city, site-specific community-engaged projects commenced in New York/New Jersey, gathering a diverse group of diasporic Iraqis. Against the backdrop of an intimate dinner setting, the participants delved into an exploration of their relationship with war and displacement. The performative acts of food preparation, recipe sharing, and communal dining emerged as contested yet poignant markers of cultural memory.