Welcome to Slow Cooking, a new multimedia podcast about all things food, art-making, social politics and environmentalism. This conversation with Estabrak / إستبرق is published in three different formats: Video, Audio and Text.

To access the other formats and episodes, simply follow this link: https://performingborders.live/commissions/slow-cooking/

In this episode, we are cooking with artist Estabrak / إستبرق in Barking, East London. We are very generously welcomed to her studio, where we spend the day preparing the food, slow cooking through the morning, into the late afternoon where we finally eat. 

Hunched over a small central table, and surrounded by Estabrak / إستبرق‘s perfectly displayed art works, we talk about art, community, and of course, the food. Not simply the food itself, which is delicious and melts in our mouths, but also the stories around food practices, what it means where it comes from. How it has influenced her work and generations of artists. How it has gathered communities together and been offered by family to friends, by individuals to communities. How it was made yesterday to offer to those enjoying it today. And how we cook today to offer it to those eating it tomorrow. How it has been appropriated, but also how it is a point of connection and resistance and anti-imperialism. 

Generosity is a word too often bandied about to describe the approaches to food and art marking processes in this episode and in Estabrak / إستبرق work. The point is connection, mutual support and love for one another.

This is Slow Cooking with Estabrak / إستبرق. Bom apetite.

Interview

Meal: Mirza Ghasemi, Bamya, Bateekh wa Jibna, Hakaka, Mineral water with Mai Zamzam

(this interview started with a prayer, which we recommend you listen to here)

Estabrak / إستبرق It’s always nice to start with a prayer. 

Xavier To center. 

Estabrak / إستبرق Absolutely, to recognize this abundance. Okay, so just for you to know, this is Mirza Ghasemi. It’s an Iranian dish. Just got aubergine, lemon, tomato, parsley, and loads of garlic. It is my favorite dish ever. It’s got a bit of turmeric. It’s usually served with egg, but I don’t like it with egg, so this is like my vegan version. Obviously I have Iraqi and Iranian heritage. This is my dad’s favorite dish, it is called Bamya. It’s a lamb okra stew with garlic and tomato and loads of lemon. Actually, the thing that connects these two is lemon, garlic and tomato. 

This (pointing towards the Bateekh wa Jibna) is something that has Palestinian dates in it as well as watermelon, goat’s cheese and walnuts and mint and pomegranate molasses. So this is like a palate cleanser, but it’s full of flavor. And this is what we call in Iraqi, Hakaka, which is basically, crispy rice and then soft rice inside. But actually the origin of this is tahdig, which is the bottom of the pan, and that is a farsi word,  that’s where it originates from. The last thing is, this is mai Zamzam. It’s mineral water mixed with mai Zamzam. So even a drop of mai Zamzam can change the chemical balance of water. 

I’ve started to just drink mineral water since the beginning of this year. And it’s really also helped my skin. It does make a difference. But you can make a prayer when you drink this. It’s kind of like when you drop an eyelash or like when you see that thing that flows in the plant, you know, that blows in there and you make a wish. It’s kind of like, a bottomless well of wishes. 

Xavier de Sousa That’s nice. You’ve suggested some personal relation to the food, and here’s your favorite food, as well as, you know the particularities to drink that we’re having, but I wonder like does any particular reason why you chose these components, these foods for us today? 

Estabrak / إستبرق The Mirza Ghasemi for me is like, you know, your party trick? I think for me, it’s like that. Not in the sense of it’s, you know, a  wild one, but more in the sense of it’s something that is so close to me that is natural to me. If I could eat this every day, I would eat every day. I also think there’s something really special about aubergine as a dish. Because like in Iraq, it’s considered like the poor person’s meat because it grows abundantly, you know, and it’s very easily accessible. Obviously meat, it would be amazing if meat was easy, accessible. But it’s not easily accessible to everybody.  

So we have a lot of different foods with me and I mean with the aubergine. But this is an Iranian dish that I adore. You know, and I’ve grown up on and yeah, it’s something as a kid and as an adult, I absolutely love, the bamya I decided last minute I’d make that because initially I was going to make masakhan for you, which is a Palestinian dish that I think is important and delicious to eat and actually easy to make, but I thought if we’re talking about slow cooking, and talking about all narratives, this is actually a really important dish for me and my narrative, rather than me telling the story or the tale of a Palestinian narrative, if that makes sense. Which is important to tell anyway, but without doubt, Palestine is present here with the za’atar, with the dates, you know, and with the heart. Good?  

Xavier de Sousa So good. Just like melting in my mouth, you know?

Estabrak / إستبرق It’s called Bamya. It’s a tomato, okra, garlic, lemon dish. Depending on where you go in West Asia, there’ll be different versions of it. We, the Iraqis do not make it with onion. A lot of other places do. But my dad loved it, and whenever I eat bamya, I eat it with his memory in mind. And I think we spoke about memory before, and we spoke about sacrifice, and I think for both of my parents, like most parents, you know, they made so many sacrifices. It’s just… this is a dish that makes my heart warm. You know, it’s actually about slow cooking and that invitation of what to cook, yesterday I was like ‘I need to make bamya.’ and I think also relevant now with Eid has just passed. My dad was a practicing Muslim, my mom is a practicing Muslim. You know, in a way, definitely on their spirits, in their life, this is an offering also to them and a thank you to them. I mean, what we’re eating here today, I made yesterday for us. But what we have been rolling today together is being made for someone, for other people tomorrow. And there’s so many things on this plate, in this serving today that are from other people invitation to us to enjoy and to pass on. So yeah, you know, it’s a  communal thing. 

Estabrak / إستبرق I think everything’s ongoing. You as an individual is ongoing. So am I. I think in the world of the arts, the idea of improvisation is seen as such a dirty concept, a dirty word. And I don’t understand why we don’t clean it more. Because it’s human, you know, and I’m an artist. Not because I want to dictate anything to the world, but I’m trying to find my freedom. And in that is so much improvisation and so much trying to learn and understand. How can I be closed off if that’s my aim? If that’s the core of my being? I think my work centers around understanding, I believe all of my work is somehow interconnected, not just because I’m creating it, but somehow the stories, or the narratives of the ideas from something before we’ll move to something else next. So like actually one of the first things I started exploring in glass was post my underwater work. I started exploring objects in water for example, rather than people in water under water during lockdown.

One of the first objects I started to explore was pomegranates. You know, so behind us in the studio there is a is a photograph of a crumbling garden under water. It’s called on me, which means my mother and it talks about the origin of verse of heritage of pomegranate can be traced back to Iran. Ancient Persia, the area of West Asia, wherever it has been before, where it is now. And there’s just so much abundance in this fruit, both as a meaning, as a metaphor, as a myth, as a visual, you know. So, for example, the water is what led me to the underwater work, is what led me to glasswork, because there is that clear connection between water and glass, not just in the transparency, but also how light could move through it, for example.

Glass is just as dangerous as water. Within a second, when you’re in the ocean, anything can go wrong. Glass can shatter at any point. Glass is also not a solid, by the way. It’s somewhere classified. Somewhere between a solid and liquid, it’s in motion. That’s why you’ll find it often in old churches or old religious buildings. You would find that the stained glass windows are thicker at the bottom than they are at the top, they’ve been there for a really long time, because glass moves.

Food is a really important tool for me, and bringing people together and also understanding myself. But it’s also a different type of language. You know, we’re tasting things, we’re smelling things, feeling things. That’s what I want my art to do, you know? In regards to the connection around the pomegranates, a lot of my glass work is made out of letters, actually, letters that have been imprinted into them, melted into them, or etched into them. These letters came from so many different concepts and also so many different conversations that as much as I’m trying to have, sometimes you are able to have them with people, with the world, with the government, with structures, whatever those letters are.

You know, there’s no doubt that these letters have come from my own personal experiences, but also from like the work I’ve been doing with homecoming, for example. That is all to do with, well, often to do with words or the dark places that people go to. And I don’t mean document in a negative way, like the scary spaces, because often that’s what darkness is associated with. I mean, more like the places that we put to one side, but we don’t want to look at. And sometimes they can be really places of hope. Recently I felt I felt peace for the first time as an adult, and that was literally in pitch black. So all of that, even my own personal journey is informed by my work. I do think it’s all interconnected. 

Xavier de Sousa And vice versa. 

Estabrak / إستبرق Right? As in, my work is informed by me already. 

Xavier de Sousa I wonder if you can expand a little bit on the connection of the pomegranate and the hand grenades, and where does that line of thought comes from within your work? Because there seems to be a particular context in that it’s interesting to you know, when exploring these works. 

Estabrak / إستبرق Interestingly, in Arabic as well, rumaan which means pomegranate also means handgrenade. So this is about the pomegranate. There’s a there’s a page online I found called Alta (see article Pomegranates and Handgrenates for the contextualisation and intersections of Arabic tradictions and use of language around pomegranates, and the colonial history of appropriation of the fruit into warfare and propaganda), which gives detail on this that is simple and relevant. So what is less apparent is the fruits relation to modern warfare stemming from the 12th century Anglo-Norman. pome gernate, English pomegranate became pume grenate in Old French. This pume grenate of course looks exactly like grenade or hand grenade. This is no coincidence. So I named the weapon after the fruit.

I have to say this for me has been very difficult to engage with as an object or an item, the pomegranate. Because for years and years I’ve stayed away from it because I’m like, why is West Asian artist, Arab artist dealing with the pomegranate? And there’s so many reasons why, but I think there must be a point in your life when you’re in this system and you’re like, ‘fuck it, this means so much more’.

You know, so actually some of the the messages behind this are hard, but they are real, you know? If you want to crack open a hand grenade today, you would see tiny balls of shrapnel inside the explosives casing. The shrapnel mimics the pomegranate seeds, each seed, the potential for a new tree, each shrapnel, the potential for a hit body. Shaped like a pomegranate and designed like a pomegranate. It’s certainly ironic that a weapon used to kill several people at once is named after the ancient fruit of. I mean, it’s disgusting.

Xavier de Sousa It’s wild. 

Estabrak / إستبرق Actually, if you think about it, the pomegranate has a head on top, so does a hand grenade. You pull it and then you throw it. And this idea of the inside body, you know, it looks like a human body. And that’s the phenomenal thing about this class work in exploring these subjects. And obviously, depending on where the light goes, things are different on the inside. To me there is such a relation between everything. When I look at this, I think of my lungs, I think of my skin. I think of the fact that with, psoriasis in particular, people with asthma, the eczema of the lungs, it’s all connected.

When I look at this, I think about my skin also because I’ve taken traces of my skin, which is in a lot of these glass works also, as well as my letters. And they’re beautiful artifacts, but they also mean something more to me, sometimes it feels like pieces of my DNA, pieces of my lived experience, my history. Sometimes I want to throw these items, other times I want to look after them. I think that speaks a lot, like the underwater picture, because I think that there is a translation between the socio-political and the reality of taking a heritage like the pomegranate from a place like Iran that literally means mythology, fertility, hope, and creating something completely different, which is a very dangerous reality, removing life and actually adding death to it. I think that that can translate to how we live as human beings with each other, you know? And I don’t just mean that again about the other. I mean it within ourselves.

This picture (points to it) that I took is called Ummi, My Mother. Mother earth but also, my mother. As much as I love her and phenomenally strong human being, there’s been so much for me as a human being… What I don’t understand… so much violence wrapped up in our cultures and our expectations and our understandings. That, to me, is so sad. You know, that something that comes from life can actually lead to death. And a lot of this work is around that, is around the risk for many queer people also to be so close to death from within their own communities. Maybe that’s a running theme throughout all of my work. Not the queerness, although I’m queer. It’s not that, it’s more: where are the edges of our life and of our ending, and how can we find them? And are we often finding them in darker spaces, or honest spaces, or places where we could be vulnerable? All these pieces, this included. I like this piece here. You see those things inside? Yeah. They’re called veils.

For us in the English language, when we’re out in the street a veil is something to cover yourself. In glass work, a veil reveals the impurities of the material. Well, you know, all these messages mean something. When I exhibited this work, this glass work, I ended up calling it For the Veil, Within The Veil, Without The Veil, because of so many reasons. There’s so many reasons behind it. Actually, before you leave, I want to show you the piece that belongs to that which has a viewer consent agreement, because, because the photograph that belongs to that can never be digitized as part of its consent agreement. 

Xavier de Sousa This is another form of offering. 

Estabrak / إستبرق Yeah, absolutely. I didn’t think of it like that. I mean, for me, I’m really interested in social experiments, like that piece that I just mentioned there. It is a provocation for the audience to ask a question of ‘can you simply follow a rule’? A simple rule. Most people can’t, because most people are greedy, you know? And a lot of my glass work was an extension of an social experiment, like Homecoming, but in a different way. These fingers (points towards the glass fingers displayed in the image above) that are made out of glass, the initial design was made out of wax and metal, then wax and then glass. What I wanted to do was get the social experiment in installation forms. That initially was created because I wanted an installation that could potentially question anybody about homophobia, but that is interactive, that would move in a space depending on how you move in that space.

We have a human connection on one side, and we’ve got a dagger on the other. Yeah. You have the choice of activating either side. Would you choose to activate that aside? That is dangerous, or could you leave it alone? These are my questions. You know, the idea of this would be to be hung by hair. Because, you know that one of the biggest conversations for me recently in my life has been around my hair, the politicization of my hair. The kind of ownership of my hair as a woman in this body. I questioned why a certain type of hair is more important than another type, you know, like, why? 

Xavier de Sousa Why socially? 

Estabrak / إستبرق Yeah, yeah. Like, why is the hair on my head more important than my eyebrows, than my eyelashes, than our ‘taches, than on armpit hair, on why? It’s just hair.

Xavier de Sousa Beauty standards for beauty. 

Estabrak / إستبرق Exactly. 

Estabrak / إستبرق You need to get this book, ‘Women with mustaches and Men without beards’. It talks about the history of within West Asia, Iran specifically, and how women had facial hair, visible facial hair and were celebrated for that. Where are they now? You know, I’m talking about the beauty standards that has erased all cultures. 

Xavier de Sousa Right. Can you can you expand on why that happened? 

Estabrak / إستبرق Without doubt, colonization and Eurocentric beauty standards. Simply, it’s that. It’s part of the reason also why this conversation, why I don’t paint skin tone when I do portraits, I only paint with vibrant colors because I believe that once we put skin tone on something, regardless of whether you try to or not, you have subconscious biases that often make you think of an image before you actually understand the image. So I try not to paint with skin tone. Not because I don’t think that we’re different. We are. We’re all different, but I think that there’s more that brings us together that separates us. And actually that in itself, as a social experiment, can you see a portrait of someone and recognize them and recognize them in you without having to see their skin tone? You know, it’s all just ongoing conversations and ongoing research. 

All these conversations are connected to me. It’s kind of like a spider web right. And this is what it looks like. This is what it could look like in a way. 

Xavier de Sousa Do you think this idea of Western beautification of things can also taps into that of the pomegranate, because it’s seen here as a very affectionate kind of symbol. It represents beauty, represents flavor, and hope. But then the story of it has been bastardized by Western powers elsewhere. You presenting it beautifully in the way they do also kind of taps into that suggestion.

Estabrak / إستبرق Totally. I mean I think all these conversations are relevant. Yeah. For me the, I love the glasswork pieces. You know I think they’re stunning. But they’re all also really heavy. And they’ve been done with so much emotions attached to them that actually when I was making them, they were so close to me that I didn’t realize the spiderweb that I was creating in regards to the outside world, if that makes sense. But the more you work in something, the more you recognize ‘oh yeah, actually, that’s the direction I was going in’. So some of the pieces were made with the idea of an installation in mind, but other pieces were expressions of myself. I think that there’s something about nature… water has always run through my work and something that also brought me to glass work was tears.

I really love the idea of tears and the fact that each tear has an emotion. There’s an artist that looked into tears underneath the microscope. The book is called The Topography of Tears (by Rose-Lynn Fisher) and it just looks phenomenal. Like landscapes, like images of land scans. The tear from sadness looks different to the tears from happiness, joy, laughter… and I think that actually glass can look different to, everything underneath a microscope could look different, you know?

Xavier de Sousa If you think about Homecoming, for instance, it is a project about home and ideas of home, and bringing people into a space where they can express ideas of home. I wonder if you can you talk a little bit about what the intention behind it was? Because I think you’re talking about your perception versus reality. There’s an unveiling at the end that seems very poignant. 

Estabrak / إستبرق Homecoming is definitely something that’s very close to my heart because, actually, the origins came from a space of my life projection painting. I wanted to move into a space of how do I get people, society, community involved in something that is either ephemeral, something to do with dark and light. But also, how do I translate my projection painting into an installation that can travel without me so that my labor is not there, so that can have life in it? So that was the initial idea of it. And stuff has happened from that, including some projection work that I think is stunning and I love.

One of the experiments that came from it was workshops with all different kinds of people, including asylum seekers and refugees. Now, obviously, I also grew up as a refugee in this country, and something that became really apparent in doing workshops with ultimately vulnerable adults where maybe sometimes English is not their first language, was this reality that there was very little spaces where they can genuinely be honest.

So with me, as someone that is an adult that has gone through a process similar to them, that might be able to speak another language like Arabic, had many people that are there are, you know, a number of people that are asylum seekers are refugees that can also speak Arabic. For them to speak to me is very different for them to speak to you, for example. When I would do some of these workshops, for example, with Welcome to English Group in Hull, this was the origin of this idea. You know, the woman behind it is a white, older English woman who’s a lovely person, but she had the people speak to her. We’re not speaking to about the same things that they were speaking to me about, and I realized ‘oh, this is a vulnerable space that I’m in that is being offered that is so valuable’. And you need more of it. You need more of it to breathe. Because I don’t have capacity to hold these things, but we collectively need to have capacity to hold some of these things. Asylum seekers to me are the most marginalized of our communities to the point that even on a system, you know, they are at the bottom of the queue.

Right now we are literally sat having this meal whilst the government still has the Rwanda plan. You know, like less than a month ago, I was protesting outside some detention centers to not get people removed to the ship that they want to place people on before they send them to Rwanda, for example. You know, it’s a very active thing still of my life and will continue to be, for the rest of my life. I cannot look away from it.

So how can that conversation that is important, critical to all of our humanity, be centered? And how can we centralize language that is not English? Why are we forced to speak English in this country when English speakers go everywhere else and speak English and are praised for speaking English and peaceful speaking one word in another language. Yeah, I’m not praised on a daily for speaking English. Why is that? Yeah. So actually, the workshops were an amazing space for me to be able to play, and to co-create with people and systems where the English language wasn’t center. We would play games where the hierarchy of people’s good English didn’t have to, you know, be the thing that dictates who says what. We would play games, physical games, mental games together, and different people could have a right to have some central stage.

So this translated to another experiment, which was, you know, if people could say what they want, what would they say? Would they say it to anyone and everyone? That’s how Homecoming, a placeless place, which is the installation that has been touring, came from. It’s a simple question: ‘What does home mean to you?’… Home is a really important one because anyone in this world can experience a home whether you’re homeless or not. The first home we’ve ever had is inside someone’s stomach, for example. And then the rest of this is whatever happens in your life. So we all have some kind of relation. But Homecoming, a placeless place is an installation where ultimately people were invited to write or draw anything they wished on the walls of a public space.

Actually, the first one was in Hull, in a shopping center. I had blackened out the walls, put some cuts and partings in, to darken the space so that no one can see what you’re doing. There’s no consequence to what you’re saying. You can literally, in that dark, say and do what you like, and no one is going to catch you out on it. So what do you want to say about your home? Well, this is something that has had multiple iterations since the inception, since like 2019. And I have to say, for me, you know, I love the work that I do, but this is a phenomenally stunning, not just social experiment, but study on humanity at certain points in time, in certain areas, certain regions, because there’s so many different languages on the walls. You could speak in any language, including visual drawing, but then also so many messages that you would have never expected. Like maybe typical things like ‘I love Yorkshire tea’, ‘You know, ‘I love biscuits’ or ‘I love my mom’s food’, ‘smell’, ‘safety’, whatever other messages might be. ‘Safety is not guaranteed for everyone’. Or, ‘the sea is a graveyard’ or ‘I love my mum, but she works in a job that takes kids away from their families’. You know, I never expected to read that one. Ever. In the latest iteration, which was in Crawly earlier this year at a time of global injustice and unrest, there were responses by the general public that just shocked me. Instead of going into a pre-made space, we had a shipping container in the middle of the city center that was blackened out and the installation space was created inside. 

Xavier de Sousa Can I ask why the shipping container. 

Estabrak / إستبرق So there were conversations on where and what and how. Initially I was anti-shipping container because I think it’s traumatic because of what shipping container means. 

Xavier de Sousa Such a statement. 

Estabrak / إستبرق Absolutely, and also part of the idea of Homecoming, a placessless place is to paint on the walls of spaces, so that these stories stay there. Bear in mind, when people are contributing, they don’t have lights, so they’re literally contributing in the dark. The only time we see what is there is when we have a reveal event and there’s UV lights, so we can actually see what is going on. I love language staying on the walls, I love that kind of reality of a space and you imprinting yourself on it. But for whatever reason we weren’t able to find a space. Then in the end, it was ‘we have to have a shipping container’ and I actually went through an emotional roller coaster with this one. But the validness of having a shipping container at this time is so significant. While shipping container ship arms, they ship food and unfortunately, sometimes they smuggle people. They have been used in this country to house people also… a shipping container in itself means so many things.

I think at this critical time of what is going on globally and internally, regionally, locally, it was actually a really great choice. The kind of compromise of having a shipping container was we have to have padding or something on the inside so that we keep the stories because they have to have a home somewhere. The conversation is going to be a legacy and quality of this work. So maybe the panels would stay on in quotes. But what’s happened since, is so many different experiences… I worked with two different organizations. One of them I felt really challenged by in the sense of… I felt a certain amount of racism towards Arabic language from them, which I don’t think that they really understood. Not the language but the… the positionality. But the second thing was it was like the recognition of the local responses to this work. You know, ‘Free Palestine’ was all over the walls. It was also in that some of the audio work that I did in that space. But on the walls, you had messages from people that were like, the ‘IDF are welcome in my home’. You know, at this time, with access to any image you could see, that is the thing that you choose to step into this public space to write on the wall with. I’m not here to necessarily judge and, you know, tel off. But it was shocking. Shocking because it just shows people for who they are. Yeah. And I want to know who I’m standing next to. 

Xavier de Sousa It was obviously a provocative statement, 100%. They want to make that statement because they want to shock and they want to provoke.

Estabrak / إستبرق Maybe they’re speaking their truth, that the narrative you’re offering is generous. We are literally living at a time where the white laws of this world are allowing for black and brown people to be slaughtered in front of us, and we are just told to take it. If you act up, you will be in prison for terrorism because you’ve said something. You know how many people are willing to go to prison for that? You know how many people are willing to go to prison for not paying your taxes? There’s just so many things wrapped up in this that actually, maybe it’s provocative, but it’s, to me, a good indication of who’s around. You know, there was a lot of homophobia on that walls as well. ‘Free Crawly of the trans agenda’. Transphobia. ‘Hamas terrorists’, ‘I love Putin’, ‘Free Crawly of immigrants’. These kind of things as well as some nice stuff, some really beautiful things around love, around language. There was multiple languages on that wall because, you know.

It’s never one thing or the other, but this time was the most shocking for me because of the global context and also the place that I was in working with the orgs I was working with, where we spent time. Unfortunately, I had to hold them. Working through their fear of anti-Semitism is going to be present, and me trying to prove that this work is not anti-Semitic, even though they don’t want to use that word. And in the end, there was Islamophobia and there was homophobia and transphobia, which all affects me. But where was the space for that conversation? And that’s the issue that we’re living in now, which if everything is just based around anti-Semitism, and around poor Israelis, but us as Arabs or Palestinians, we cannot even be seen as human beings… What the fuck, you know?

The show was taking on that straight away. The legacy that was initially promised no longer is a legacy. They don’t want to continue it because I think they’re afraid of whatever that work showed. But I know that it’s in storage and hopefully something will happen with that work. To me, I think at this critical time of our lives, this work needs to be shown because we need to be talking about what is there, not hiding away from it because we’re scared and we don’t know how to handle these conversations. If you want to present work like Homecoming, a placessless place, understand it’s not just about fun and not just about opportunity to be vulnerable and honest, but it’s also a space to actually engage with our own selves.

If one of the principals of this project was to not centralize English, does it matter if we understand everything as long as we’re all present? Then why was I forced into a position of giving translations? Even the social prescribing work that we’ve spoken about before, where I host workshops, food workshops with asylum seekers and refugees and vulnerable adults. Initially, I was invited to come in through the NHS to do art workshops, but it became clear that food is a thing we have to do. That space with the people has been phenomenal, even to the point that if something goes on in Iraq, I get messages from the people, from the participants, my friends. ‘Are your family okay? Are you okay? How are you doing?’ I’ve never got one message from any of my colleagues. We’ve spent times talking in group, therapy, monthly therapy sessions where we discussed how the situation with Ukraine happened, where the whole session was taken up with Ukraine. And I did not understand why no one asked about Afghanistan, about Iraq, about Syria, about Lebanon at that time. Because those are the people that I was working with. How can we take up a space for that, but not this.

My work is based on integrity. And it’s strange for me when people invite me in their space and then when I’m in there, are afraid of the reality in front of them, you know? That’s why I know I need to continue doing my work. But then on the other hand, it’s so hard to do my work because, you know, even to the point of I don’t want my face everywhere. I don’t want you to use me as clickbait. You know, that’s so hard for organizations to understand, because why would you want to be all over the internet?

Maybe I’m also trying to find in my work this language, maybe that’s why even with the performance work, it’s not my face everywhere. I’m behind something. Or even with the Homecoming type of work, it’s behind something. The underwater work… It’s a faceless thing. These letters that are in the glasswork… someone said their manuscripts, and you can’t read them, but they are present. So there’s this invisibility, this veiling that is so evident in my work, and I think a thread between everything.

Speaking of which, there’s an image right there of veils that is actually, an image from a Brazilian artist called Luto, who looked in Brazilian Portuguese means they want to fight. They are not a religious person, they’re a queer person. But everywhere in their areas they had graffiti-ed this. And this is because every woman is the same, that’s what they’re trying to say. We all fight the same systems, let us stand together, you know? 

Xavier de Sousa And the mourning as well, of the wearing of black, it transcends religion? 

Estabrak / إستبرق Yes. Yes. 100, 100%. 

Xavier de Sousa My grandmother were black for five years. 

Estabrak / إستبرق Wow. 

Xavier de Sousa You know, after her husband died. That’s something that specifically women, you know, live longer than men in rural Portugal…

Estabrak / إستبرق Why is that? 

Xavier de Sousa Oh, I think it’s it’s a social conditioning issue that it’s like the men are traditionally laboring away in the fields and they’re not… Man also have bodies are not necessarily taken care of, but then also the foods are eaten, they’re very heavy and very meat based, heavy sauce-base… so it becomes unhealthy, and then also I think there is heavy alcoholism that comes in with the living conditions there and poverty… that affects the men in that context more than women. But you see, a lot of women don’t stay in mourning for the rest of their lives. They wear black for the rest of their lives. 

Estabrak / إستبرق My mom never got married again after my father died. Yeah. And I remember one time asking her you know would she be interested I think if I’m really honest, soon after my dad died I did make a comment like, absolutely not. I remember even me saying you cannot be with someone else. My dad died when I was 14, what did I know? I knew the culture around me, but as I grew up, I asked my mom, ‘would you be interested in dating someone else’? And she was like ‘shut up’, like, don’t ever speak to me like that, you know? It’s like this for women like her, I believe, because it’s not spoken and they can’t speak about it because it’s uncomfortable to speak up. I’ve seen too many women like my mom not try and have a new relationship. I really wonder if it’s because of their own choosing or their own forcing, you know? 

Xavier de Sousa The idea of companionship that I find quite odd that people are socialized not to have an idea of companionship or collectivity. Even that is quite individualized. 

Estabrak / إستبرق It’s the same thing really as with Homecoming. The main thing was ‘English is not their first language, so how could you work with them?’… Part of this, the skill set that I have been building, is how to have workshops and how to create spaces and experiences where English is not the central point. Simple as that. The initial idea was to do art therapy, and in a way, I was going to transfer some of the Homecoming workshops into this. The initial space I was working in was a GP practice, but after the first session I told them this is not the appropriate space to be doing the work that you are asking me to do, because it’s such a clinical space. We need an alternative. In those sessions you had like old older people that could barely walk with younger people that literally could speak maybe two words of English. All different kinds of genders, all different kinds of religions, all different kinds of languages in that space. And you’re expecting me to do what exactly with this situation?

So what I did was I started to use play initially to experiment in those classes, to learn from people and to get you to stimulate different parts of your body and different parts of your thinking. Food is a central part of my upbringing, I believe being Arab, of being Iraqi, Iranian, whatever you want to call it, of being a human. I think food, water is central, so there’s always some food present. What I started to do or was always doing is bringing cooked foods. So it to me was actually one of the first dishes that I brought into that space. So I started to notice that this guy was building spoons and bowls and kitchen utensils. And so I basically start to speak to him as much as I could… I also have words that are in different people’s languages, so I could at least say thank you or hello. It turns out that this guy specifically could speak Arabic and let me know that he doesn’t have access to a kitchen and he can’t eat the hotel food that is being provided to him because it makes his stomach sick, and he goes to people’s houses when he can’t eat, but he tries to go to the mosque to be fed there.

On the other hand, you’ve got this older woman that is a lovely woman talking about her beautiful kitchen and the meals that she makes in that. There was a clear divide on so many levels from class, religion, race, finances, positionality, whatever everything was. I went back to my manager and I was like ‘what you want to do does not just involve art, it has to involve something else that can help these people… food can help people. Firstly, it can offer people that have limited access to decent food, a decent meal. When we cook these workshops together, it’s like this, but it’s for 20 people. So it’s abundant and the ingredients are good ingredients and they’re nutritious. There’s always food for people to go home with, you know. I managed to persuade them and they managed to see the numbers grow, you know, and they could see also that people were responding really well to these workshops. I did it for two and a half years. It was only earlier this year that it stopped because of funding

The thing that I realized in these sessions is that there’s not many people like me, firstly, that think like me, and also that can offer spaces like me where I’m happy. The idea was always that someone new would lead and you didn’t have to learn the English words. You could describe how you’re cooking. In whatever language, we will eat together. We will understand each other for sure. You know, and it was really interesting because the system that we tried to create, I think it was successful. But when you try and translate it or when you try an offshoot it, you know, like a conveyor belt, let’s say, and you go to any space that’s willing to support you are losing the intention of the work.

The work was always to have a facilitator that has lived experience of whatever that group is going through. So homelessness? Yes. Refugee. Yes. Migrant. Yes. Different language. Yes. A disability. Yes. You know, so there’s a translatable thing. So now once this session started and we were realizing that money is being run out, you’re having organizations like the Quakers, for example, the Friends of Quakers in Brighton coming to this, to the session, because they have a kitchen space and they want to offer it not necessarily to us as a group, but to the asylum seekers to go there to do that with them.

I was having some people come back to me and speak to me about the fact that they were asked in this cooking session ‘wow, you know what a computer is?’ or ‘Oh, ‘so you must have been rich in your country’ or ‘my gosh, you know how to use an oven’… You know, basic stuff like that but this is so hard to translate into a system like the NHS… Also the Robin Hood Foundation was who hired me into this to also translate to management like this… this is a big issue because the organizations that you’re getting involved with are finding ways to support these groups are white and have a lack of experience with anything that these people are going through. So the lens is always going to be othering. For me, I didn’t want to be a part of that system, you know. I think I really do question the space I’m working in on a managerial level. I don’t think just because you’re a manager, you can say whatever you want and get away with anything. There is a question to what your actions and there should be consequences if your actions are unacceptable. You know, and I think that’s hard for people to be honest with you to work with because as we see nod your head, get your paycheck and move on in life, you know, that’s what they want of us. That’s what the government wants. That’s what the systems want. 

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Estabrak / إستبرق
A collector of skills, Estabrak’s إستبرق an award winning cross-disciplinary artist, film maker, facilitator, researcher and producer committed to experimentation, inclusivity and a participatory arts practice.

Water, social experiments, anonymity and non-identifiable approaches are tools often explored by the artist to honestly focus on the fragility between beauty and danger. Inviting community engagement to navigate the ever evolving and ephemeral human condition through themes of home, resistance, love, trauma and belonging. 

Continuously evolving and multi-sensory in approach, she layers numerous voices to ask ‘What silenced truths can be revealed here?’ 

Using live techniques, film, projection, sound, performance, paint, installation, (underwater) photography, words and public participation to help highlight and dismantle ignored sociopolitical realities.  

Estabrak / إستبرق has showcased on an international basis also exhibiting at the Royal Academy of Arts & Tate Britain. She’s been supported by agencies including; the Wellcome Trust, Arts Council England, Unlimited, Invisible Dust, Bagri Foundation, Red Bull and the Ocean Global Foundation. Her work has also been presented to the UN. 

Based in London and working internationally, she is originally from Iraq, born into exile in Iran and raised in London, after having come to the UK with her family as a child refugee. 

Xavier de Sousa
Xavier de Sousa (he/they) is an multidisciplinary performance maker and culture worker based between Portugal and the UK. 


They co-curate the digital research and live art commissioning platform performingborders, and Citemor Festival (Portugal). Previously developed and co-curated performance events Queer Migrant Takeover and CUT Festival, as well as New Queers on the Block, Marlborough Productions’ Artist and Community Development programme. Their creative practice also encompasses writing, having published various creative, reflective and research-based texts for publications such as METAL, Penguin, Les Cahiers Luxembourgeois and Centre national de littérature – Lëtzebuerger Literaturarchiv. As a producer, they launched the free-resource space Producer Gathering together with Sally Rose, and worked on the development of the Producer Agreement, the first agreement of its kind in the sector for unions BECTU and ITC. Previously, they produced for independent artists such as Louise Orwin, jamie lewis hadley and Evangelia Kolyra, amongst many others.

Xavier’s performance works include Almost Xav (Southbank Centre), and the trilogy of collaborative shows about belonging and power structures, POST (Ovalhouse, international tour), Pós- (Teatro do Bairro Alto & CITEMOR) and REGNANT (HOME, LiveCollission). They have recently launched a performance-exhibition What Becomes… (METAL, East Street Arts) and a series of multi-media podcasts Slow Cooking. Previously, they collaborated with Tim Etchels, Rosana Cade, The Famous Lauren Barri-Holstein, Needless Alley Collective and presented work with Ovalhouse Theatre, HOME, East Street Arts, Latitude Festival, Tate Modern, METAL Culture, Southbank Centre, The Yard Theatre (UK), Untethered Magic (Kenya), Warehouse9 (DK), CITEMOR Festival, Teatro do Bairro Alto (Portugal), Operastate Festival (Italy), Onassis Culture Centre (Athens), IIT Gujarat (India), Kalamata Dance Festival (Greece), Más Allá Del Muro Festival (Mexico), amongst others.

Xavier is a founder of Migrants in Culture and is a member of BECTU and ITC – Independent Theatre Council.

Website: www.xavierdesousa.co.uk | Twitter: @Xavinisms | Instagram: @Xavinisms