From One Life, to Another
Fatima Alaiwat is an artist, activist, land-based worker and cook who explores how we can grow a deeper sense of belonging through food and soil.
We came across Fatima’s work, not by sight, but by smell. Her most recent work following her MA in Art and Ecology focuses on oranges, and the entangled political and migratory histories with which they are embedded. The work invites participants to eat oranges, and the peel is added to a composting process, “creating a home for microbes... inoculating waste with a type of dynamic power that enables [the oranges] to transform into something else”. Soil care, and how it connects with broader notions of care, is at the core of Fatima’s practice. Now that her degree has finished, she’s looking forward to finding a tactile space, like a farm or garden, where she can continue to develop her research and art practice, aiming to find new potential in growing, cooking and composting, and how they can be at the heart of social change.
Fatima grew up in Bahrain but now lives in the UK and finds that food is a powerful tool to “re-collect home”. After spending years WOOFing and farming on permaculture farms from Chile to Greece, she is aware that engaging deeply with food cycles gives us a greater respect for food provenance - an awareness essential to political engagement with the climate crisis. Fatima has spent time researching Bokashi composting, Japanese for “organic fermented matter”.
Fatima finds Bokashi an empowering process as it doesn’t require outdoor space. By building intimacy into our relationship with food (as well as food waste) and farming, Fatima hopes that everyday practices can become acts of activism, radical movements away from cultural and systemic homogenisation. Fatima will donate the compost made from orange peels during her exhibition to a local garden charity, maintaining the cycle of her work and returning it back to the land.
Photograph of Fatima’s word at the Goldsmiths MA Art and Ecology show
Check out some more of Fatima’s work @home_land__
