22 May 2026
Food is not neutral. In Palestine and in the diaspora, every meal carries memory: of erased villages, uprooted land, and recipes carried across borders that cannot be crossed again. To eat together is not a simple pleasure, but an insistence on presence, a refusal to be erased.
This relationship between food and memory is shaped by displacement and diaspora. Palestinian food culture has been formed through ongoing movement and loss. From refugee camps to cities across the world, it carries an irreplaceable sense of place: specific land, light, and seasons remembered and reimagined.
Yet that land has been profoundly damaged. Harvests are blocked, water is restricted and trees uprooted. And still, people plant again. They cook from what remains, sustaining something no occupation has been able to extinguish.
It is within that context that the conference of Spatial justice & the Palestinian Table takes place, coinciding with the opening of the installation The Palestinian Table. Convened in partnership with community members across the world, the conference examines how built environments, landscapes, and geographies are weaponized, and how artistic and investigative practices name what has been done.
The installation and the conference share a methodology: tracing harm through its material evidence and insisting that what has been destroyed is witnessed.
