Son[i]a #445 – Mirna Bamieh
In this podcast, Mirna Bamieh thinks aloud through disappearance: of dishes, of access to land and sea, of routes between Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza. She lingers on fermentation and preservation as slow, stubborn forms of survival in times of genocide and exile, on pantries that prepare for emergency, on doors and foodways as thresholds between worlds. She speaks of immigrants’ suitcases lined with Zaatar, olive oil, and citrus, of how cooking can make a scattered life legible, and of how stories travel through potatoes passed from hand to hand in the street. Here, recipes become maps and memories, jars become time capsules, and the everyday choreography of hands in the kitchen opens a space where grief, rage, and tenderness ferment together into something that insists on remaining alive, visible, and shared.
Mirna Bamieh (East Jerusalem, 1983) is an artist whose work traces the politics of disappearance and the fragile architectures of memory that shape Palestinian life. Moving across video, text, ceramics, performance, and food-based research, she examines how political fragmentation alters what communities can access, practice, or transmit. Trained in psychology, sociology, and video, she has turned to food as one her most insistent languages: a way to touch what history erases and to listen to what occupation tries to mute. Through projects such as Palestine Hosting Society, Sour Things, and Potato Talks, she follows the fragile trails of recipes nearly lost, the gestures of women moving through kitchens, the wild plants that can no longer be freely foraged, and fermentation as both method and metaphor. For her, the kitchen is not a backdrop, but a frontline where identity, memory, and land are constantly reconfigured—a place where resistance can take the form of a jar, a pantry, a shared table.
