Shades of the Earth by Farah Nasrawi and Nahla Tabbaa

Artist Farah Nasrawi is in a perpetual state of strife with time. Torn between resisting nostalgia and compulsively documenting memories, she has developed an affinity to the lifetime of objects, living things, and spaces in which she has lived in. Whenever they moved homes, Farah’s family would take their plants and trees with them.

Similarly, when Nahla returned to her family home, the pangs of urgency to savour memories became too acute to ignore. After a 15-year absence from her homeland, Nahla dyed and buried a piece of linen in her garden for thirty eight days. The textile, laying as a tablecloth at the Delfina Breakfast, is an alchemical sponge of soil, minerals, decay, and time.

Shades of Earth mimics soil, using traditional ingredients culled from the memory of family cupboards. Qiz’hah قزحة: is the Arabic term for a nutty-flavoured, black Nigella seed extract combined with sesame seeds and other simple ingredients to produce an earthy-flavoured biscuit. The artist’s aunts would compete to make it for her.

Farah pays homage to this pièce de résistance by removing it from its traditional context. She honours the act of gardening: Qiz’hah allegorically represents the soil that binds her heritage, memories, and identity; it emblematized loss and separation from her colonial-inflected homeland. This tangle of rootedness and expulsion is further complexified as her cultivated soil is shipped and consumed in an imperial elsewhere, the qiz’hah transiting to a colonial source. 

Having recently enrolled in a culinary school in an organic farm in Ireland, Nahla now  reinterprets Rewilding the Kitchen, unlearning her intuition, replacing handfuls and fluidity with grams and minutes. She welcomes this new education, finding spirit and magic in this system, foraging the scents and tastes of boundless varieties of plants and flowers. Here, she crystallises her forage with sugar, and presents other foraged flora and fauna from fig leaves to sea moss— all edible. The crystallised forage takes place just after the first frost, a moment in agriculture, that signals the death and destruction of flora and fauna as they prepare to sleep during the harsh winter. The irony in this death, is that the cold crystal shards deepen the flavours of whatever it enshrouds, creating an environment for a death that is sweet and pungent.