Reading

In 2024, we continued hosting reading sessions in the SAE Greenhouse while also extending a few sessions to other inspiring spaces, such as Le18 in Marrakech, Zari3a in Rabat, and Hyperwerk in Basel. These sessions centered on decolonial feminist perspectives in agroecology, with a particular focus on Palestinian agricultural and food systems.

Throughout the year, Kenza Benabderrazik and Tara Lasrado began curating a growing collection of books and resources on the intersection of art x agroecology. This collection, made visible and accessible in the Greenhouse, featured books primarily from our personal libraries. It was a deliberate effort to amplify often unheard and unseen voices and practices within environmental discourse.

This year, the reading sessions became an occasion to collaborate with other spaces and individuals, including Les Complices*, Heiba Lamara, Sarah Mounia, and Balkis Guetta. These gatherings were more than discussions—they were a shared practice of questioning and reflecting, nurturing the community we hold dear. They served as a space for connection, fostering dialogue and curiosity around the transformative possibilities of agroecology and its intersections.

For the last reading session of 2024, we  explore layers of meaning around the political ecologies of water, cosmogonies, diverse knowledges, scientific data, and poetry, bringing both research and questions into perspective – bringing water, holding the streams of thoughts and practices around preserving, accessing, and navigating it in diverse contexts.

A recording was done during this Monday Reading Session  and diffused in January 2025 on Radio Lora.

This session was included as a stream of the Migros Museum exhibition Stretching Thresholds, Holding Streams by Jeanne van Heeswijk and Sophie Mak-Schram. With a focus on water, we dove into a series of texts, scientific articles and poetry unpacking water through care, colonial entanglements, resistance and more.

The sounds have been saved and polished from the messy Greenhouse noises and our clumsy recording by Neil Darmon.

We suggest a reader for the most curious ones.

on monday 18.11 we invited filmmakers Balkis Guetta Benouachkou and Sarah Mounia Kachiri to initiate our reading session, as a sharing on their research project ALPLAS*, designed to be told in the form of a documentary story.

Sarah and Balkis took us through a compilation of selected texts, film clips and voice notes from their archive on mountain habitats of the sacred, identifying alterity, to the nationalisation of nature and naturalisation of the nation, the use(s) of tourism, to learning from ancestral techniques, reclaiming narratives and storytelling. the sharing revealed their practice of making the unseen/unheard seen/heard, resonating deeply with our ongoing reading practice.

on monday 21.10 Heiba Lamara initiated our reading session with arvae making connections between growing and publishing. we collectively read an excerpt from «Adjusted Margin» by Kate Eichhorn on xerography, art and activism; and «Time Stood Still in these Gardens» a zine by Synchar Pde @tungtapandjadoh while collaging with materials from Heiba’s «Sow Together» archive as well as images of seeds, plants and Palestine from the ETH media archive.

n May, we attended the International Society of Ethnobiology Congress in Marrakesh with Tara Lasrado to present “ALIMENTO: Exploring food systems based on reciprocity and circularity.” In an ongoing collaboration with Tara Lasrado, Adriana Domínguez Velasco, and Paloma Ayala, we explored how ALIMENTO challenges extractivist, patriarchal, capitalist, and colonial models through decolonial practices.

We also hosted a Reading Session for the Harvest Festival at Le18Marrakech, featuring readings from Dr. Simon Gwara’s article on human excreta in agriculture, an essay on mycology as a queer discipline by Patricia Kaishian and Hasmik Djoulakian, and an excerpt from Nada Elia’s book “Greater than the Sum of Our Parts: Feminism, Inter/Nationalism, and Palestine.”

Last year, our sessions focused on Palestinian agricultural and food systems, with curated texts made available online. Two notable events took place with the collaboration of Lescomplices*:

1. Film Screening and Reading Session: The Untold Revolution: Food Sovereignty in Palestine

On April 8th, we screened The Untold Revolution by Ameen Nayfeh, a 2021 documentary exploring the Palestinian agricultural movement’s journey toward food sovereignty. The film highlighted efforts to break dependency on Israeli occupiers and global monopolistic companies, advocating for systems rooted in local resources, cooperation, and culturally appropriate practices.

2. Film Screening, Talk, and Reading Session: Who’s Afraid of Ideology?

On May 6th, we collaborated with Marwa Arsanios and Les Complices* to present Who’s Afraid of Ideology? (Parts I, II, and IV). The films examined themes of ownership, extraction, feminism, and grassroots resistance, particularly through the lens of the Kurdish autonomous women’s movement and land struggles. The event included a talk with Marwa Arsanios, providing insights into her interdisciplinary work on gender, spatial practices, and resistances.

Both events were enriched by reading materials from the arvae x SAE Greenhouse library, emphasizing decolonial feminist perspectives on agroecology.

On the 4th of March, we welcomed the artist Marie Van Berchem and her project La Bateauthéque.

La bateauthèque is a participatory resource dedicated to critical, decolonial, anti-racist and feminist thought. La bateauthèque is nomadic and develops through different locations, different materializations, different collaborations, with the aim not only of providing access to works but also of creating a physical space conducive to reflection and dialogue.

In august 2023, we were invited to Blackbox Geneva to host a reading session in the Parc du Cropettes.