Home Is Where the Hearth Is 

Fall 2018


        On Saturday July 13th, Carhartt Work In Progress, the contemporary, European designed offshoot of the American heritage workwear brand, released a collaboration with Braindead - a three year old, counter-culture, DIY inspired, streetwear collective with an eye for eccentric graphic and a presence that exists more online than off. To celebrate their union, the two brands threw a release party at a cactus store. Simply called the Cactus Store, this succulent adoption center migrates from Echo Park in Los Angeles, to a vacant lot in New York’s Lower East Side, during the most humid months of the year. Between bamboo trees as tall as the surrounding tenements, and inside the barebones polycarbonate greenhouse, filled with plants new to the Eastern Seaboard, downtown New York’s youthful creative class tried their best to look aloof and uninterested. Men - artists, designers, photographers - maneuvered the tight crowd dressed in Carhartt overalls fitted with Braindead branded straps. Embellished on the left knee, were, once again, the words “Brain” and “Dead” - painted in a font that evokes lightning and death metal.

        As effete guests posed for photographs, Palestinian American artist Amanny Ahmad tended to vegetable skewers over a charcoal grill built from stacked brick, no mortar. Roasting food over a fire is conventionally perceived as a practice in sustenance, rather than art. First conceived when our distant, once or twice removed ancestors, Homo erectus, discovered the advantages of separating raw meat from flame with a thin layer of air - it predates culture, yet is instrumental in defining it.

        Ahmad’s presence can temporarily hide her short stature. Wrinkle nor blemish can be found on her olive skin, contradicting the age on her passport - but what does 30 even look like? Depending on the weather, her style treads a line between  successful middle aged writer spending sabbatical in a small hamlet in Vermont and ethically conscious, first row fashion week invitee who uses her outfit to present a daily showcase on color theory. Her black hair, when not braided, extends past her waist and reveals someone who will be heard.

        Ahmad studied at the Cooper Union, where she became interested in ephemeral art on both a conceptual and working level. Her practice revolves around this concept and what she produces is “art that isn't rooted in its physical embodiment. Art that is not predicated on the existence of an object.” She wants to create work that can be understood and appreciated by all, regardless of formal training. Pretensions stand in the way, and are meant to be broken down. At the time of writing, the transformative process of cooking is her medium of choice. In food, she found a way to make art without a byproduct.

        She never intended to be a chef (she has no formal training), but now she moves from place to place cooking and eating, so to those who don’t know her, she is one. Ahmad makes the commute from her current hermitage in Delaware County, a few hours upstate, to Bed-Stuy and Chinatown, often for weeks at a time. Like a swallow, she migrates to fair weather in Los Angeles, the Ciudad de México, Thailand, Greece - anywhere that excites her. Whether driven by her work, or an energy charged deep within, she travels to learn from indigenous traditions, eating away at her primary source material. On her journeys she’s never far from a book, one of the few constants. “I have something of a book addition. I have way more books than a person who doesn’t have a home should have. I keep a few books with me and everything else in my storage unit, or wherever my shit is. Yah, life is complicated.”

        Work was never steady, so Ahmad built a life in the negative space. Reflected in her travels, inherent in her practice is using the principles she learned through her artistic education, and translating them to search for vehicles to communicate ideas about how we can relate to one another. She says, “that limitlessness is very important and interesting to me and there’s no reason to be attached to a specific type of modality.”

        The thought of becoming an Instagram influencer makes Ahmad gag, but the platform affords her what she misses living her freelance life. “I make connections with people near and far, and can stay in conversation, both with words, and with images, with my peers. It is a way for me to continue to stay connected to the communities that I am a part of, and at times to stay within the spectrum of people who hire me, even when I am far away.” LinYee Yuan of Mold Magazine, who worked with Ahmad on a project for Adidas, thinks that “the opportunity for us right now is that on tech-enabled platforms like social media, we can demand for certain transparencies in the algorithms that promote representations where as often times in the establishment, those levers are opaque and impenetrable for certain kinds of artists.”


        Wherever Amanny may be, she’s just passing by. Ahmad was born in Salt Lake City, Utah. She has a tattoo of former Utah Jazz basketball player John Stockton on her elbow. After her parents separated, she briefly moved to Arizona with her mom before returning to Utah when she was five years old. Utah would be her home for ten years. She’s also a registered Palestinian citizen,  having lived there for almost two years as a child - granting her dual citizenship. Her citizenship is a privilege. Of the more than 9.5 million members of the Palestinian diaspora, half are not citizens of any state. Summers would always be spent there. Even during financially difficult periods, “somehow those trips always happened.”

        She still visits her family in the West Bank, who live in a few villages about fifteen minutes from the capital, Ramallah. “I was raised to be very aware of my Palestinian-ness and what being a Palestinian is. It was always a very important part of my identity. I didn’t think about it, it was just how it was.” She often reminisces of the Palestine she experienced as a child. She says, “the way that Palestinians and people of that region have traditionally utilized the land for food is something that is now becoming a trendy way of relating to food. Localized, seasonal, eating is a fact of life there.” In the afternoons, she learned to forage with her cousins, gathering za’atar, something she incorporates as part of her artistic practice. (Not to be confused with the spice blend, za’atar also refers to a family of herbs found in the Middle East, which include, but are not limited to, varietals of oregano, thyme, and savory). But Israel’s occupation and continued settlement is slowly erasing these Palestinian traditions. In 1977, Israel banned the foraging of za’atar, a traditional spice intrinsic to the Palestinian diet, because of ecological concerns. Later, in 2006, authorities began punishing those found carrying it at checkpoints. As homes and orchards are began demolished, seed varieties used by generations of Palestinian farmers are disappearing.

        To combat this, Ahmad works with the Palestinian Heirloom Seed Library, founded by agronomist Vivien Sansour, that tracks down and preserves these seeds as a way to safeguard the region’s biodiversity while also documenting their history and traditions to educate future generations.

        In July of 2017, Ahmad held a four week residency at Dimes, a restaurant in Chinatown, where she produced four nights of dinners for a couple dozen diners. Profits from the series were donated to the Heirloom Seed Library. “Dimes gave me a platform to do things that I want to do. In that regard, that’s how I see them function. They share their stage - what they’ve worked hard to build - with people who need it.” While the menus were Palestinian themed, they were not traditional. Mandolined beets and root vegetables, slices of fennel, scattered with pomegranate seeds, plated with edible flowers better reflected Ahmad’s experience and perspective than a monolithic Palestinian diaspora. She made taboon, a Middle Eastern flatbread, using the pizza oven at Scarr’s around the corner. Over the course of the four part series, most the food served was vegan which has more in common with downtown New York than the Levant. “It's important to me as a person and as a creative that my identity and career isn’t defined by any one aspect of who I am. I think that I’m really resistant to being pigeonholed as the Palestinian girl who cooks Palestinian food.”

        At the same time as Israel uses legislation to erase Palestinian identity, they are co-opting the same symbols as inherently Israeli. However, Ahmad cautions that the focus shouldn’t just be directed at cuisine - borrowing and mixing is natural to development. What needs to be highlighted is the power disparity. “People really get caught up on the falafel and hummus talking points. It’s about using food as another way to oppress and control people while denying them access to their native foods.”

        Central to the Palestinian struggle is their confinement. “As I’ve gone back, I’ve watched more and more construction, both of the settlements but also of methods of restriction and containment. Both on a physical level and a bureaucratic level. When I was really young you could still drive a car from our village to Jerusalem. That would take 25 minutes.” Checkpoint after checkpoint marks the route towards Israel, often she takes a series of taxis that ferry people between sets of roadblocks. While driving with one of her cousins, who was taken to prison at seventeen for a social media post that Israel viewed as an incitement of violence, he would flag down every oncoming car and ask them if there was a pop-up checkpoint ahead. “His anxiety was so palpable, it became my anxiety,” she says of the experience.

        Food insecurity is rampant in the Palestinian territories and part of Israel’s campaign is making Palestinians dependent on foreign products. Farms are disappearing and there is little industry left. The food they eat comes from across the border wall, as do many of the other products they to sustain themselves. The restriction of movement is also a restriction of choice. Amanny notes that someone had tried to setup a boycott of Israeli goods in her family’s village, but it failed because they lacked the monetary resources that would allow them the luxury of substituting cheap Israeli goods with more expensive counterparts.

        In contrast, Ahmad is an active participant in the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanction (BDS) movement. In October, she along with over seventy others in the food industry, like Sara Kramer of Kismet in Los Angeles and chef Daniel Patterson (and many of her peers like Frisch, Dimayuga, and Francis), supported Palestinian workers and their Israeli allies in signing a document that called for chef Gabrielle Hamilton to drop out of an Israeli sponsored food event. The Tel Aviv Round Table, a collaboration between female American chefs and their Israeli peers, is seen as part of a larger branding campaign to improve Israeli’s image - especially as the Israeli Defense Force exercises extreme levels of asymmetric violence against Palestinian protests. On November 6th, Hamilton dropped out.

        Back in March, Ahmad reconnected with Max Martin, an old acquaintance and co-owner of the Cactus Store, at a Palestinian Grill event she held at 356 Mission, a now closed event space in Los Angeles. The flyer for the event read: “A portion of the proceeds with be donated to Palestinians working towards a return to self-reliance.” From there, Ahmad travelled to Palestine. Back in Los Angeles, she presented to Martin, a jovial man who’s never without a smile and tussled hair, what she had brought back. “Pressed flowers labeled with the plants name and what mountain or field they were picked from, bags and bags of spices, herbs and teas, packets of seeds from native plants, rare cassette tapes, and about five pairs of tiny Tom & Jerry socks (these did not fit her and there was plenty more in her suitcases she didn’t show me),” he says. Martin had envisioned offering casual, daytime lunch at the Cactus Store and Ahmad had struck a chord. He knew she wasn’t interested in the idea, so at first he just asked for advice. Text messages and emails were sent back and forth, when finally Ahmad, frustrated with Martin’s (partially feigned) naivety, took on the role of programing a dinner series at the Cactus Store in New York.

        You can barely make out the greenhouse - obscured by bamboo trees, yuccas, and the dozens of other winter hardy plants that help cover two thirds of the lot. On Essex Street, attached to the black gate is a small, metal sign with the address, hours and a phone number. Underneath is another sign, made of wood, that’s been hand painted red and black - the information is the same, only it’s in Chinese. Open to everyone, wood benches and two pieces of custom granite seating welcome anyone who wants to escape New York for a minute, or an hour. Outside of the greenhouse, nothing is for sale. Ahmad sees The Cactus Store as a reaction to how New York’s changed since she arrived almost ten years ago; what she defines as the “classic trap of more - where everything is more expensive, there’s more crappy people, there’s more CVSs - I’ve just watched a lot of the cool little bits in New York disappear, all our little spots. I’ve watched them gradually get swallowed up in the moreness of it all.”

        Among movie screenings, talks, live music and other community events, Ahmad organized the series around other chefs with similar goals. Ahmad says that exploring way of  “working with ideas and resisting objecthood and commodity” is why she tends to “function in these more ephemeral spaces.” On one night, Kit An Kin, founded by Anya Peters and run with the help of her family, threw an ‘evening lime’ - a Caribbean hangout that featured open flame grilling. Later, Gerardo Gonzalez, formerly of Lalito, would celebrate Californian street food with dried porcini tamales with fermented greens and tomatillo. He offered his own rendition of frutas locas - fresh fruits, often served on the side of the road, with lime juice and spices. Ahmad also brought along Sabrina de Sousa, the owner of Dimes, to celebrate her Brazilian heritage with feijao and as it is the case with all events at The Cactus Store - free of charge and welcoming of all.

        After our last interview, Amanny spent her 30th birthday in the Cayman Islands. Her life had been upended by a recent breakup. Unsettled, she went to the beach to process. “It’s Eat Pray Love, I’m aware. Just call it like it is.” She was also there working with sound instead of food, for a project that Gonzalez is involved with. From there she flew to the Ciudad de México, and then to the coast of Oaxaca. Then back to New York. Her destinations aren’t on a checklist. Martin says, “you’d have to ask her, but I get the sense she’s led by her heart, her stomach and an urge to learn new things. And there aren’t very many goats in Brooklyn.” There will always be something to explore, just as there will always be parts of the past worth revisiting. “In the age of the freelancer - these weird ways of making money and surviving, different kinds of systems of existence make it more possible for people to go ‘well actually maybe I don’t want to do that. Maybe I’m good at this or maybe this is interesting to me.’ I might not be cooking in two years. I could be doing something completely different and I feel good about that,” says Ahmad.