Overview
“Where are you from?” is a commonly asked question around the world, particularly in multinational spaces like the UAE. But in an increasingly mobile world, both virtually and through physical migrations and re-migrations, it is not a simple question, and it often comes loaded with undercurrents of racial, ethnic and socio-economic status
Indeed, the question is actually, “What is your heritage?” Heritage is how we identify ourselves to ourselves, as well as how others place us in the world through their perceptions of our heritage.
However, global trade and mobility are old companions, and as such, current thinking in critical heritage studies rejects definitions of heritage defined by the Eurocentric and UNESCO World Heritage Sites, which confine heritage to physical spaces; or the narratives of governments, which limit heritage to national borders. Nor in digital times can collective memory, whether of a family, a community or a geographical area, be limited by borders. In reality, maps are inexact and borders are fluid. Rigid master narratives—defined by religion, history, geography and so on—have attempted to delete or smother alternate narratives, thereby deleting the fluid connectivity that made them possible. We must ask ourselves: how can recognizing this connectivity of heritage and memory across trade routes provide for a stronger, more sustainable future?
This kitchen breaks from the concept of heritage as pursuit of exclusivity by instead considering heritage through mobility as a form of connective inclusivity. This kitchen considers heritage and memory not as divisive, contested spaces but rather explores how heritage along trade routes speaks to different memories through shared experience. We will explore heritage and memory as products of humankind’s trade routes, borderless, fluid and everchanging, and interconnected through the traded commodities that have shaped and defined communities across the globe. This shared heritage—which has come at great cost for some, but great benefit to others—exists not only in physical space, but also in the digital domain and collective memories that are part of our daily lives and rituals. Through this shared experience, we look to negotiate political and religious conflict and environmental challenges, and to build new expressions in the creative arts that acknowledge the past while embracing the future.
Kitchen Projects
The term “Middle East” is derived from the region’s geographical location as a colonial trade hub connecting the Indian Ocean and Mediterranean Sea. This multidisciplinary kitchen’s focus is on the port cities of these trade routes; the oceans that connect them, and the peoples that enable this network of global trade to function. The kitchen will consider the significance of interconnected heritage as developed through migration and how these intersect with memory in contemporary ports today.
The Mediterranean and Indian Ocean trade routes had already left legacies of ongoing political strife and violence, slavery, indentured labor and other abuses to humans and their environment, even before the complicated disruption of colonialism that occurred from the 16th – 20th centuries. However, these trade routes also left behind positive residues, from great advances in experimental science to radical new art forms, but these advances were not without controversy and postcolonial erasures, like the tide eroding pictures made of sand, were common.
Combining video, audio, theater and photography, this kitchen’s projects map and frame these multiple, diverse heritages and collective memories, seeking new forms of connectivity, with the aspiration that such connections provide a means of moving towards preserving our heritage practices in a more sustainable manner.
This entire kitchen project looks at the commodities, ecology, new art practices and religions that Indian Ocean and Mediterranean trade routes map. Using academic and field research and creative projects, the kitchen relies on each participant’s research/creative skills to explore these questions in different ways.
