Echoes iof Ingredients #7 | workshop by Yasmine Sefraoui

17.10.2026

Yasmine Sefraoui presents

“Resilience and belonging: on date palm”

Drawing on Abd al-Rahman I’s 8th-century exile poem, in which a solitary palm tree becomes a mirror of the poet’s own condition of exile, uprooting and solitude, cultural producer and chef Yasmine Sefraoui invites us to explore the date palm as a figure of resistance, resilience, displacement and belonging.  The date palm is one of the oldest plants humans have domesticated, and one of the most quietly resistant. It endures conditions that defeat most other crops, refuses a single clean origin story, and carries its meaning forward even when its history has been stripped away. It has been fought over, renamed, uprooted and replanted far from home, and it has kept bearing fruit regardless. This workshop sits with that endurance, as plant and as food. Through readings, conversation and tasting, we will think together about what resistance and resilience look like in something that has so often been made to move, and what that might tell us about belonging.

This workshop is co-organized with Archive of Belonging, a platform and resource database founded by artist and writer Arjuna Neuman to support migrants and refugees. Yasmine Sefraoui collaborates with the platform for its session dedicated to food.

Yasmine is a chef and cultural producer who sees food as the most interdisciplinary of grounds, a place for connection, creativity and care, and a powerful way of telling stories. Trained in Anthropology, she works with attention to cultural history, past and present, and her practice draws on her multicultural background. Developed at the intersection of food, community and the arts, her work includes food-led residencies and community kitchens in Glasgow, co-programing Delfina Foundation’s Politics of Food, and micro- catering in London.

 

This event is curated by Valerio Del Baglivo as part of Echoes of Ingredients, a series of collective cooking sessions exploring how the histories of trade, empire, colonialism, and migration resonate through the trajectories of a single ingredient or recipe — and what these resonances can teach us about liberation, imagination, and empowerment.