Potato Talks

Live art perfromance, 2016-ongoing

“Every sphere of human activity -Even peeling a potato- can be a work of art, as long as it is a conscious act.” Joseph Beuys

Potato Talks is a public performance project that takes the figure of speech—peeling potatoes—literally.  Centered around this everyday gesture, each performance gathers ten storytellers in a public space to explore a shared theme.

Through peeling, sharing, and speaking, participants reveal the power of simple acts as vessels of memory and identity, bridging the mundane with the profound.

Each edition transforms public space into a communal kitchen, where stories simmer and collide. Audiences, both intentional and accidental, are invited into an unfiltered exchange, raw, present, and alive.

Potato Talks is an ongoing experiment in how the ordinary becomes extraordinary, where small gestures open portals to connection, meaning, and transformation.

Why Potatoes?

Potatoes are like stories they come from the land, they are familiar to the people in the street, yet the magic happens when those potatoes are brought from the closed doors of kitchens to the street, becoming story holders. Just like their waxy and starchy earthy non overpowering properties, that offer a rich canvas for many other favours and textures to raise.

And! The Potato has deeply rooted stories of immigration, foodways, colonialism, famine and wars and survival.

Who are the Potato Storytellers?

the transformation to become a potato storytellers happens after a three-day workshop guided by Mirna Bamieh, focusing on deep listening and slow attention. Through shared meals, reflection, and spacific exercises according to each theme, we begin to uncover personal stories rooted in everyday life. It’s a gentle process where memory, gesture, and voice meet. By the end, each participant holds a story ready to be shared: honest, unpolished, and told while peeling a potato.

Every edition of Potato Talks has the same flow:

In a public space, 10-12 storytellers peeling potatoes for 2 hours. In the chairs opposite them accidental passersby sits on the empty chair and the storyteller starts asks them to  help  by holding the peels of the potato, and recounts in a one-to-one interaction a story that peels through layers of the theme in focus.

After the story is finished, or even while it is being told, the listener is free to interact, comment, or even join in peeling a potato and tell their story, there is no time limit for this action. Once the passerby decides to leave, the storyteller goes back to peeling potatoes, until another passerby joins in, and the story is being told again.

Potato Talks: All the ways we shield, all the ways we reveal. Kunsthaus Zurich, 2025.

For this special edition at Kunsthaus Zürich, Mirna Bamieh collaborated with the museum’s security guards, those who silently watch over the artworks yet remain outside the curatorial spotlight. Over the course of a three-day workshop, I worked closely with them in preparation to step into the role of Potato storytellers. The guards share how their daily proximity to art has shaped personal reflections, experiences, and quiet forms of connection. This performance brings forward hidden layers of labor, memory, and presence embedded within the museum walls.

Like with all Potato Talks perfromances, the potatoes of the storytellers are turned into a shared meal of Batata Harra shared with the public making the end of the perfromance a social gathering of eating together. 

Potato Talks: Thinking like a Mountain. Biennale Gherdëina, 2023

The Edition of Potato Talks opened the ninth edition of the Gherdëina Biennale on July 2023, responding directly to the curatorial theme. The stories of the ten storytellers living in Val Gherdëina, speak of mountains and paths, of migrations and returns, of wilderness and animals, mixing personal experiences and legends, myths and everyday stories, that connect the local context - the Dolomites and their valleys - with other mountains in Europe and the Mediterranean, embracing, within a single choral narration, the field of investigation - from North Africa to the Middle East - that Biennale Gherdëina 9 intends to make its own.