Living Thought Conversations
Yasmeen Al-Qaisi & Sujatro Ghosh: Nourishment, Kinship, and Hope
Friday, 5 December
18:00 - 20:00
The Legacy | Bucharest
Str. Gazelei 44
The program Cultivators of Life, organized by tranzit.ro/Bucharest, continues the series of conversations in Living Thought, with guests Sujatro Ghosh, artist-activist and cultural practitioner (India/Germany/UK), and artista Yasmeen Al-Qaisi (România/Germania).
The conversations in Living Thought aim to introduce contemporary scholars and artists who are working in the emerging field of knowledge and practices relating to land, to indigenous/ancestral knowledges and eco-social realities, and who are proposing not only reviews of problems, but visionary alternative paths. Continuing of the ongoing work of the Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life, the intellectual conversations in Living Thought are tools of conviviality aiming to spark the radical imagination needed to change our relations to culture, to re-orient our sense of the world, and to regain an ethical life outside the ongoing war on life.
Yasmeen Al-Qaisi & Sujatro Ghosh: Nourishment, Kinship, and Hope
Sujatro Ghosh explores hunger not as absence but as political construction, tracing the afterlives of the Bengal Famine of 1943 in contemporary land struggles from India. Through the cultural significance of Annapurna, understood not as a distant goddess of nourishment but as a cultural framework, nourishment is seen as a right and as something political, spiritual, and relational, while rice as an archive and cosmological element. The result is a form of political theory connected to the global food sovereignty struggles, one that is inviting practices of learning from each other through land, care, community, and shared abundance. Yasmeen Al-Qaisi shares reflections, sounds and voices from a unique trajectory of finding and carefully relating to sources of nurturing and communion, by listening and learning from the wise grandmother from Teleorman and from night workers, from Ottoman and Arabic legacies, from peatlands in Lithuania, mines in Brazil, and the cohabitation with storks.
The talk will be followed by a conversation with Ovidiu Țichindeleanu.
Sujatro Ghosh is a multidisciplinary artist-activist and cultural practitioner. His practice seeks to generate spaces of social action, political reflection and conditions through which othered and silenced voices may be heard. His work unfolds through film, performance, poetry, fabric installations, and photography, combining conceptual inquiry with material experimentation. It draws from radical thought and lived experience, engaging themes such as queer rights, diasporic tensions, women’s rights, climate change, gastro-politics, and transnational migration. His current research explores the entanglement of food, memory, violence, and justice, particularly through the afterlives of the Bengal Famine of 1943.
Yasmeen Al-Qaisi (often misspelled) is a poet who writes for voice and paper, articulates and performs language to irrepressible forms of literature through sonic, culinary, or care-based practices. When writing with sound, Yasmeen stimulates nonexistent institutional forms, invents professions, engages in human and nonhuman and broadcasts on public and independent radio stations in temporary or mobile formats.
The event is part of the program Cultivators of Life, a multianual project organized by tranzit.ro/Bucharest Association and co-financed by The Administration of the National Cultural Fund. The program continues and supports the activities started in 2021 at the Experimental Research Station for Research on Art and Life in Siliștea Snagovului, focused on conserving biodiversity, testing ecological prototypes, and rethinking the relationship between soils, materials and artistic production. Curated by Adelina Luft, the program proposes the study and formulation of a new lexicon and practices related to an emerging relationship between indigenous/ancestral knowledge, land cultivation and natural sciences, realized through a series of artistic residencies, open events in gardens around Bucharest, applied workshops, conferences with indigenous thinkers and a final group in 2026 at MODEM – Center for Modern and Contemporary Art in Debrecen.
The program does not necessarily represent the official position of the Administration of the National Cultural Fund. AFCN shall not be held liable for the program's content or any use to which the program outcome might be put. These are the sole responsibility of the beneficiary of the funding.
