Falafel Road Residency

Oreet Ashery and Larissa Sansour

Falafel Road Residency, February 2010 – Book your meals now

including Food, Glorious Food event at Iniva at Rivington Place on Saturday 13 February and call for Falafel Footage

Oreet Ashery and Larissa Sansour have recently collaborated on The Novel of Nonel and Vovel (pub. Charta, 2009), a critically acclaimed and unique graphic novel which raises questions about Palestinian/Israeli cultural collaborations.

Complementing and contextualising Nonel and Vovel Oreet and Larissa are undertaking an extraordinary series of live events, public discussions, meals, exhibitions and residencies in London in February 2010 in collaboration with the Live Art Development Agency, Artsadmin, Iniva at Rivington Place, and the Serpentine Gallery.

Ashery and Sansour’s Falafel Road Residency is exploring manifestations of the falafel as a Diasporic food that has been assimilated into London’s rich food culture, and as a well contested national symbol in the Near East. Throughout the Falafel Road Residency Sansour and Ashery will continue to address forms of cultural colonialism in relation to the Middle East through the outlandish and irregular means they have begun to develop in their book. The Falafel Road Residency will include the pair hosting twenty publicly engaged meals at falafel eateries across London where members of the public and specially invited guests will join them every day for a ‘falafel experience’ and where each meal will be filmed. This psychogeographical project will chart a subjective and exilic map of the falafel in London as well as a map of those participating in the meals, creating a collage portrait of friends, colleagues and other relevant artistic and political networks. The filming of the meals is inspired by Gordon Matta-Clark’s movie of Food, the SoHo restaurant co-op that Matta-Clark co-founded in 1971, and which served as a social meeting place.

For full details of the eateries and restaurants Ashery and Sansour will visit, and to book places, please go to http://www.falafelroad.blogspot.com/

Food, Glorious Food at Iniva, Rivington Place on 13 February.
As part of their residency the pair will also host presentations and discussions on the many different ways in which artists work with food as a political site and context at Iniva at Rivington Place on Saturday 13 February from 16.00. Contributing artists include Bobby Baker, Blanch and Shock, Richard DeDomenici, DoEAT, Antonia Grant, Mad for Real, Scottee, Shabnam Shabazi, Caroline Smith, Superflex and Ali Zaidi. Food, Glorious Food is a free event and as well as invited artists’ presentations, audiences are also invited to bring along a memory or an observation of how food has a political and/or cultural resonance for you.

For full details of the project and Iniva event please visit http://nonelandvovel.net

As part of the Falafel Road Residency Oreet and Larissa are also seeking falafel related films:
“Wherever you are in the world, we are looking for a short footage of a falafel eating, or other falafel experience. This can be shot on a mobile phone, video camera, or real film. It can be spontaneous or constructed. The footage will be screened as part of the Falafel Road residency during the whole month of February 2010 at Iniva, London, and Artsadmin, London. It might also find its way into the final Falafel Road film.”
Please send your footage as Quick Time files ( .mov) either electronically via services such as www.yousendit.com, with a link to timowenjones@gmail.com, or by post to Tim Owen Jones, Falafel Road Project Manager, c/o Artsadmin, Toynbee Studios, 28 Commercial Street, London, E1 6AB, UK to arrive no later than Friday 19 February 2010.