Fatoush

Collective Salad Making & Dinner

In the Middle of Parallel Universes (3/3)
Part of 12 Timmar; at Småland Triennale 2026
Konst som Social Omvandling; St: Sigfrid Folkhögskola, Växjö

Today’s communities in South Lebanon live with layers of displacement and interrupted cultivation; fields, and food infrastructures have been repeatedly bombed, burned, and bulldozed by Israeli military operations, which have destroyed tens of thousands of long‑lived olive trees and left many farmers unable to reach their land.

Fattoush, a well‑known mezze and salad from Lebanon and the wider Levant, emerges from peasant and villager practices of refusing waste: farmers fried or dried leftover pita and folded it back into a salad of seasonal vegetables, herbs, and wild greens rather than throwing it away. It is a bread salad, that pays attention to resources, a way of thinking with what is on hand, and of extending the life of bread, labour, and land.

Anthropological work on bread in Palestine describes the “afterlives” of stale bread as a moral project: keeping bread in circulation becomes a daily practice of care, social cohesion, and ethical self‑making under conditions of siege and settler colonialism.

This collective dinner invites us to the Parallels table to care for the vegetables and cook together as the day comes to a close. In preparing fattoush side by side, we rehearse other ways of inhabiting scarcity by sharing a bowl that has always been rooted in village economies and everyday acts of resilience.