The project “Ahlan at the Table” is an attempt to research the movements and meanings related with food and migration. It is a performance which combines sounds, life stories about coming and going, and culinary emotion. The performance seeks to revive the interactions between tradition, integration and exchanges in food-related practices transformed by identities in transit. The project’s sound-related feature attempts to act as a fictional future for a world in which our relationship with speech and objects is complete altered by our condition as nomads.

The goal of “Ahlan at the Table” is to highlight these components in food-related practice, discovering new dimensions within them. At the same time, it questions them, as a way to discover unexpected bonds among different people’s stories. By creating a series of slides, this inter-disciplinary project attempts to use technological artefacts from music to immerse participants at the heart of a discussion about the relationship between listening, meals, borders and testimonials. Mixing journalism, anthropology and art, “Ahlan at the Table” proposes a musical “para-fiction” about food, and the public is invited to the join us.

The project was conceived by Suraia Abud and Camille Jeanjean, with the cooperation of Casa Árabe.

Camille Jeanjean (1989, Paris) is an independent journalist. She graduated from the Iscom Institute in Paris, where she studied New Media. She lived in Beirut, Lebanon and Brazil for two and half years, working for local magazines. Her interests include producing new narratives using the digital arts, music, light and technology. Movement and migration inspire her, so she is always travelling to places undergoing change. She hopes to experiment with the place where art and journalism intersect.

Suraia Abud Coaik (1982, Montevideo) is an independent anthropologist and chef. Residing in Madrid since 2002, she seeks out food and art-related projects that combine diverse forms of knowledge from Lebanon and the Mediterranean with those from South America. She focuses on Food & Music as tools to discover social and cultural realities, and the complex, connected dimensions they possess. She is interested in the diversity and transformation of realities represented in the specific cases involving foods, and she attempts to create ties between art, anthropology and foods.

Further information:
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