Dallas (Texas), 27 October 2013 (SPS) - The New York artist Robin Kahn collaborated with the National Union of Sahrawi Women present ‘The Art of Sahrawi Hospitality’, an art project predicated on social interaction and engagement, from October 16-20, in Dallas, Texas, the organiser said in a statement.
The project was premised on the idea that in Hassanyia (the spoken dialect of the Sahrawi people), the word “haima” means both family and tent.
As customary in everyday life, the women set up a traditional “haima” in the center of Main Street Garden Park and invited the public inside to share tea, music and conversations about Sahrawi life.
Their site became a center of social interaction and hospitality, the catalyst for engaging visitors in discussions about how the Sahrawi’s rich cultural history has strengthened their people’s unity through war, occupation and exile.
For five days, Dallas, Texas “…was invited into the heart of the Sahrawi world…to not only learn about their plight, but also to appreciate through the beauty of their creation, the role of art in making a new and better world.”
Robin Kahn is the author of Dining in Refugee Camps: The Art of Sahrawi Cooking, a cookbook-in-solidarity with the people of Western Sahara.
In 2009, she traveled to the Liberated Territory and the Sahrawi Refugee Camps in Algeria to create an art project for ARTifariti, the arts and human rights festival.
She spent a month cooking with Sahrawi women in their improvised kitchens and eating with their families in order to document the traditions and rituals of the Sahrawi meal through personal stories of survival.
She assembled a cookbook from photos, found objects and drawings that provides a view into the complex roles that Sahrawi women assume in order to provide strength, hope and history to their exiled community. (SPS)
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