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My menus are disappearing recipes
Is it also hard to succeed?
Mirna Bamieh in conversation with Bogna Świątkowska
You make this huge effort, and what is the outcome of it? Does it make your situation better? Is it really fruitful in terms of achieving something?
Do you consider yourself a Palestinian artist? Do you need this adjective, this descriptive part about what kind of artist you are? No, it is always an exploration. What excites me are the questions, playing around with them without wanting to find the answers. Three years ago I would never have thought that I would create a project called the Palestine Hosting Society. But I did. It changed my life, and in another three years my life will also be different again, I might create something totally different. We come from a place where the politics is very hard to predict. It keeps changing, but at the same time it is very static. That‘s the struggle: our existence is based on resisting the efforts of erasure, erasing Palestinians. I have never known a time when there was no Israel, so for me there are things that never change, but at the same time the future is very hard to predict. There is a layer of dreaming throughout all of this. That is why I believe that Palestinians have a very rich imagination: we have to imagine our identity all the time, just in order to exist. We keep reinventing ourselves. We were never on the privileged side; we never had ready answers and we never had a plan. You never know when there is going to be a new Intifada. My generation grew up in two Intifadas. I was 3 during the first, and I graduated high school during the second. And then there are
all the other major events that have happened. It is hard to settle.
Succeed in what?
You mean as an artist? Or as a human being? Both. For me personally, I never had high hopes regarding politics. I know it is built on layers and layers of corruption. I do believe in people, in our right and in our liberation. The liberation of Palestinians and all the oppressed nations of the world and human beings. Sometimes, simply seeing the similarities between dif ferent struggles is liberating in itself. And that is why I think I can make a change by focusing on what I do and giving it my all. For a long time, presenting myself as an artist did not seem to have any value. I was creating work that I loved, and still do, but when it came to presenting myself as an artist, I assumed that people were thinking: oh, but what do you really do? How do you make a living? That‘s why it felt good when I was teaching at the university, because I could say: I‘m a teacher, I teach art. Now I say I‘m a cook [laughs]! That raises even more questions: in which restaurant do you work? I say that I work through my art. It sounds even more confusing, but that‘s good. I‘m reclaiming the kitchen, for my art. When I explain this practice to people, it makes sense to them. This year was very tough for me, both in a good and challenging way. I received lots of media attention and now many people know about my work. I receive a lot of very heartfelt messages about how valuable what
