The empty seat at the table, reflections on the work of Palestine Hosting Society.
Lecture Performance, 90 minutes.  

A lecture-performance that weaves together storytelling, archival research, and acts of radical hospitality.  Emerging from Mirna Bamieh’s long-term projects Palestine Hosting Society and Sour Things, it reflects on food as a site of disappearance and endurance.

Speaking from a place of distance, Bamieh revisits her first and last research trips in Palestine before the war, tracing how recipes, lands, and gestures vanish under occupation yet persist through memory and care.

The performance blends live narration, projected images, sound fragments, and moments of collective food sharing. Absence becomes a material presence, the host who cannot return, the dish that cannot be made, the table that holds both loss and continuity. Through this constellation of storytelling and sensory experience, Bamieh invites audiences to consider how cooking, preserving, and remembering can open a space for mourning, resilience, and the imagination of a different future.