Forbidden Landscapes

Fighting Seeds Collective x SPORE Initiative

Berlin, 05 May 2025

© Silvia Russo

In the collaborative and regenerative garden of SPORE Initiative, we gathered for a workshop that intertwined foraging, collective cooking, and storytelling as ways to reconnect diasporic communities with land and memory. Co-curated by Fighting Seeds and SPORE, this space welcomed families with roots in Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and other diasporas, offering wild plants, shared memories, and traditional recipes as bridges between displacement and belonging.

We began by setting up the kitchen, preparing the space that would later host our collective food preparation using plants from the garden. Salma shared with me the process of making the dough for fatayer, leaving it to rest for several hours. As she kneaded the flour, I asked her about her earliest memory associated with the smell of freshly baked fatayer. She recalled a childhood episode: a family picnic at the zoo, where her mother had packed fatayer for everyone. On that occasion, the wolves at the zoo approached the fence, and her mother threw them a piece of fatayer, an unexpected moment of interspecies sharing: the wolves loved the fatayer! We all laughed together. She explained that fatayer is a typical dish of celebration and togetherness, meant to be prepared and eaten collectively.

Meanwhile, we moved through the garden and adjacent areas for a session of collective foraging. We encountered species such as nettles (Urtica dioica), creeping thistle (Cirsium arvense), and a wild umbellifer with a tuft resembling carrot leaves. Mikhail Lylov, gardener and facilitator at Spore, offered us an introduction to the garden’s ecosystem, emphasising the shared inhabitation and co-creation between species in the garden, and the subtle strategies plants use to capture water and ensure their seeds travel and take root.

As we walked, we discussed the resilient qualities of many of these plants, like the Palestinian Akkoub (Gundelia tournefortii), known for its capacity to regenerate even under harsh conditions and for its strong ties to food culture and collective harvesting traditions in Palestine. Through this exploration, we came to recognise how plants, often dismissed as "weeds" in European urban contexts, are in fact living archives of diasporic knowledge and practice, their very survival embodying an act of ecological resistance.

This awareness carried into the second part of the day: collective cooking. The plants we had gathered were incorporated into the preparation of wild fatayer, kneaded and filled by many different hands, each bringing its own memories and gestures. Cooking together became both a political and cultural act: through food and the plants that persist, we activated a process of rebuilding diasporic community and reasserting fragmented belonging.

The workshop ended with a warm moment of sharing stories and reflecting on the bond between humans and plants. We talked about the importance of ecological practices that recognise interspecies connections as the foundation of sustainable coexistence. 

In the face of displacement and fragmentation, collective foraging and cooking become powerful acts of cultural reclamation and resistance. As we prepared wild fatayer and salads together in an interspecies relationship, we all formed a community rooted in memories and the living networks of plants, which continue to grow and resist.