In June 2026, NW welcomes Palestinian artist Shayma Hamad for a first residency marking the beginning of a longer-term development trajectory in collaboration with De Warme Meente and Kitchen Stories.

De Warme Meente — a small-scale permaculture collective based in Moorsel, near Aalst — and Kitchen Stories, NW’s community kitchen project, have been working together for some time around sowing, harvesting and collective cooking as forms of social infrastructure. With Hamad’s invitation, this collaboration expands towards a broader inquiry into food as a carrier of memory, movement and political history.

Under the title How to Dance a Recipe, Hamad explores how recipes operate beyond instruction or representation: as embodied knowledge, as choreographies of repeated gestures, as archives of migration and survival. Moving between performance, collective cooking and artistic research, her practice considers how taste, scent and touch preserve forms of memory that resist easy translation into language.

During the residency, Hamad will work together with Kitchen Stories and De Warme Meente around questions rooted in the local context: what grows here, what is shared here, and which histories circulate through ingredients, rituals and seasonal labour? The residency unfolds through a series of encounters, workshops and public moments in which cooking emerges not simply as a daily activity, but as a way of shaping relational and political forms of togetherness.

PROGRAMME

Wednesday 3 June
Introduction between Shayma Hamad, Kitchen Stories and De Warme Meente

Thursday 4 June, 14:00–17:00 (welcome from 13:00)
How to Dance a Recipe — workshop with Shayma Hamad & communal gardening day

In this workshop, Hamad departs from the idea that a recipe always contains more than a set of instructions. Recipes carry memories, affects and bodily patterns — gestures that are often passed on across generations without ever being explicitly articulated. Through plants, taste, scent and collective presence, the workshop explores how the body retains forms of knowledge that language alone cannot fully access.

Open for participation (5 places).
To apply, send a short motivation to samira@nw-aalst.be

Friday 5 June, 20:00
Screening of Wild Relatives (Jumana Manna, 2018)

In Wild Relatives, filmmaker Jumana Manna traces the movement of seeds between Syria, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault and Lebanon. After war reaches the agricultural research centre in Aleppo, seeds are retrieved from the global vault for the first time and replanted elsewhere. The film connects ecology, colonial infrastructures and displacement, raising questions around ownership, biodiversity and the political control of food production.

The screening will be followed by a conversation with Kitchen Stories, De Warme Meente and Shayma Hamad.

Sunday 8 June, 13:00-17:00
Velt Open Garden Day

Public moment within the residency project.