What Survives around a Plant? | Workshop by Andek Akkoub

Beginning with Akkoub, we explore what happens when when relationships to plants and land are interrupted. What Survives around a Plant? A Table of Living Practices A workshop by Andek Akkoub: Bana Khalaf & Janine Kaselitz We have learned to name, document and archive what lives around us. From Seasonal wisdom, recipes and foraging practices to plant names or culinary stories. Yet even as we preserve this knowledge, we become increasingly disconnected from the land and relationships that make it possible. What does it mean to preserve something by practising it? How do we stay in relation? Beginning with Akkoub, a Palestinian wild edible plant, we explore what happens when relationships to plants and land are interrupted by displacement, restricted access or changing ways of life and what questions of power emerge when living knowledge is separated from the places it comes from. From there, we invite you to trace a plant that has travelled through your own life: one you forage, cook, grow, remember, miss, or can no longer reach. Around a shared table, these plants and their stories begin to form a collective map. A tablecloth becomes our canvas: a living record of the cultural and personal relationships we hold with land. Together, we remember what has been interrupted, while asking what practices and forms of knowledge we choose to keep alive. Bio Andek Akkoub is a grassroots initiative growing from one wild edible plant: Akkoub. Gathered, cooked and passed down for generations, Akkoub carries stories of food sovereignty, land dispossession and what happens to knowledge when people are seperated from the places that hold it. The initiative is stewarded by Bana Khalaf, a Palestinian storyteller who dreams of farming her land, and Janine Kaselitz, a cultural researcher and strategist advocating for just and regenerative futures. Together, they create immersive workshops, communal tables, installations and community programmes rooted in the belief that knowledge survives through practice. Through cooking, gathering, remembering and passing things on, Andek Akkoub explores how living knowledge stays in motion, and how cultural spaces can nurture more reciprocal relationships between land and community.