The Work of Many Lives

Across ‘Ancestral Knowledges: My Grandmother Is My School’, the grandmother was positioned as a synecdoche for systems of knowledge that have been ignored, dismissed or actively suppressed. Speakers repeatedly returned to maternal and ancestral figures who transmitted knowledge informally through embodied practices – such as weaving, singing, cooking, hosting and tending land – articulating a way of life grounded in care, dignity and attentiveness to the natural world. This was powerfully embodied in the second day’s keynote address by Céline Semaan, author of A Woman is a School (2024). The ideological framework of Semaan’s book echoed the symposium’s subtitle, and her address set the tone for the day’s programme.

Semaan spoke of coming from a lineage of women who do not call themselves scholars, yet encode knowledge through gestures, rituals and recipes. She described hosting as an act of radical generosity, and birth as an act of survival and resistance in a world that persistently seeks to diminish the presence of certain peoples. During her presentation, she recalled wearing jeans and no makeup to a hair salon in her home country of Lebanon, where the stylist gently but firmly insisted that dignity must not be surrendered even in the midst of war. In an act that Semaan understood as an intimate, unceremonious transmission of care, the stylist traced eyeliner across her lids before beginning to do her hair.

As Semaan spoke of this moment, my attention shifted to the audience: someone’s nails painted deep burgundy and threaded with gold; the precise symmetry of another attendee’s braids, neatly parted and weighted with beads; another’s heavily pierced ears forming small constellations. Semaan insists that memory operates as a form of infrastructure – fragile, embodied and vulnerable to erasure through war, genocide and post-internet methods that she described as ‘algorithmic burials’. In her writing, she refers to stories as ‘data with a soul’, insisting that data is never neutral. During the subsequent Q&A, the mediator initially described Semaan’s work as ‘lifelong’, then corrected to the reality that it is the work of many lives.

This emphasis on continuity established through community extended across the day’s talks and workshops. Following Semaan’s address, speakers and attendees gathered around a long communal table to share a meal prepared by The Syrian Sunflower, founded by Syrian chef and human rights activist Majeda Khouri in 2019. Conversations unfolded over shawarma, pumpkin falafel and hummus. The lunch offered a break in the programme and functioned as an extension of the symposium’s intellectual framework: knowledge exchanged through proximity, sustenance and informal dialogue.

The afternoon programme resumed with a series of presentations and a panel discussion with Alia Swastika, Charmaine Watkiss, M’Barek Bouhchichi and Rosalind Nashashibi. Each speaker approached the question of ancestral knowledge from a distinct cultural and disciplinary position, while remaining in close dialogue with one another and the wider themes of the day.

Alia Swastika, Director of the Biennale Jogja Foundation in Yogyakarta, situated her ongoing research on Indonesian women artists within the socio-political context of Indonesia’s New Order period. In her presentation, Swastika foregrounded communal and embodied practices such as weaving and farming – activities frequently dismissed as informal or domestic, yet ones that require sophisticated mathematical, ecological and scientific knowledge. These practices, she argued, function as living archives, encoding systems of measurement, seasonal observation and spatial organisation passed down through collective labour, rather than written instruction. Like Semaan, Swastika emphasised community not as an abstract ideal, but as a practical infrastructure through which knowledge is sustained.

Swastika further addressed the significance of collective cooking (rewang) and communal eating, framing these acts as ritualised forms of social knowledge enacted at births, weddings and funerals. Such gatherings reinforce interdependence, memory and ethical responsibility within the community. Swastika also spoke of women-led protests against environmental degradation, positioning these actions as extensions of long-standing relationships with land and resources rather than isolated moments of activism. Her contribution extended the symposium’s central claim that ecological care and political resistance are deeply entangled with ancestral knowledge.

From communal labour and ritual, the discussion shifted towards the textures of everyday life. Irish-Palestinian artist Rosalind Nashashibi reflected on her experiences in Palestine, showcasing her artistic practice as one that attends closely to quotidian gestures as sites of knowledge production. She began by describing a social context in which notions of personal space and ownership are fundamentally relational. Rather than property being understood as something inherently possessed, possession is often determined by use and proximity. She illustrated this through an anecdote in which someone casually drank from her orange juice. Similarly, the domestic scenes in her short film Hreash House 2004 showed cousins sharing a bed in their grandparents’ home in Palestine. Such moments articulated forms of intimacy and collective care that resist Western ideals of privacy and individuation.

Questions of symbolic loss and epistemic hierarchy were addressed by Moroccan artist M’Barek Bouhchichi, who alluded to rematriation as a framework that regards knowing with as much esteem as formalised knowledge. Similarly to Semaan, he described his grandmother as ‘neither scholar nor ignorant’, thus also emphasising forms of understanding grounded in lived experience rather than institutional validation. His grandmother remained in the oases of south-eastern Morocco while he and his parents migrated to a city, and Bouhchichi framed her visits as embodied reminders of the continuity of the homeland he left. Through her recurring visits, forgetting did not exist. In a poetic register, he spoke of his grandmother as someone who never attended school yet possessed an intimate understanding of her world, both material and immaterial, human and non-human. She ‘read the sky like the palm of her hand’ and ‘created calendars from the dates she placed in her soup’, marking time through seasonal and material cues rather than abstract systems.

Bouhchichi situated these reflections within a critique of colonial education, noting that colonial curricula routinely exclude local histories, producing what he termed a form of ‘cultural blindness’. Such frameworks presume a hierarchy of knowledge that privileges written, institutionalised learning while dismissing embodied, relational and intergenerational epistemologies.

This critique of epistemic erasure was extended by British-Jamaican artist Charmaine Watkiss, whose practice is centred on botanical knowledge. Watkiss reflected on a childhood shaped by herbal remedies, an experience that continues to inform her drawings, sculptures and research into Caribbean plant knowledge. Her practice challenges the marginalisation of Indigenous healing traditions within pharmaceutical culture, notably through self-portraits in which she appears as warrior figures embodying the medicinal properties of specific plants.

During a residency at the British Museum, Watkiss encountered the legacy of Sir Hans Sloane who is often credited with ‘inventing’ drinking chocolate. She disrupted this narrative by noting that cacao was prepared with milk in Jamaica long before Sloane’s arrival in the early eighteenth century. Historical research by James Delbourgo substantiates this claim, tracing such practices back to 1494.1 Watkiss’s intervention exposed how colonial histories routinely recast long-standing Indigenous practices as European innovations. This pattern of epistemic erasure resonated with my own schooling in Nigeria, where a British curriculum presented Mungo Park as the ‘discoverer’ of the River Niger, despite centuries of habitation and knowledge along its banks. Together, these examples underscored how ancestral and indigenous knowledge has been systematically displaced to centre European authority.

Before the keynote had even begun, the day’s attention to material intelligence was established through a morning workshop led by Lucía Pizzani. Participants were invited to reflect on what clay meant to them, drawing on cultural lineages from New Zealand, Tunisia, China, Italy and beyond. Several referenced creation stories in which humans are shaped from earth, while others spoke of clay as a vessel that holds food, water and memory. These reflections resurfaced as the audience watched Pizzani’s video La que viste la Piel’ (The One Who Wears the Skin) 2019, in which she lies beneath a layer of red clay, peeling it away slowly. Both body and clay leave their marks on each other, underscoring a reciprocity between body and material.

In the hands-on workshop that followed, participants pressed wet clay imprinted with dried corn and other plants onto paper. The significance of the corn became apparent when Pizzani recalled Mayan creation myths in which the gods first attempted to create humans using clay before turning to corn as a sturdier material. Like Watkiss, botanical legacies and environmental activism underpin her creative practice. The plants featured in both their works hold embodied histories and so become living characters in the artists’ stories.

Each clay-print functioned like a compact block of information that holds the memory of every mark pressed into it. The individual prints began to link visually, forming elongated, spine-like structures across the paper. When several of these spinal forms accumulated side by side, their networks began to resemble the subterranean tunnels of an ant farm or the delicate architecture of a spiderweb. In this way, the prints assembled themselves into an embodied system, a living diagram of the material intelligence of clay and what is buried within it.

As the programme drew to a close, the audience attended Mirna Bamieh’s remote lecture-performance The Empty Seat at the Table 2025, which began as a screen-recording showing several windows playing videos of women cooking. A window then popped up in the centre showing Bamieh, who spoke of her work with the Palestine Hosting Society: cooking, and gathering and sharing recipes as methods of recording disappearance, memory and resilience. Like the weaving, clay-working and plant knowledge discussed throughout the day, recipes here functioned as living archives, preserving what displacement threatens to erase. Bamieh posed the question: ‘If the world as we know it pulls apart, what role would I want to take?’ Her immediate answer was the cook, as she highlighted the practice of hospitality, ‘not as a performance, but as a political and emotional act’. Through cooking and sharing recipes, hospitality became another method of preservation and transmission – knowledge sustained through embodied practice rather than written record.

This second day of the symposium articulated a sustained argument for respecting ancestral knowledge and the natural world in the face of their ongoing suppression. Across diverse cultural contexts the speakers demonstrated that knowledge is not solely produced within institutions, but sustained through embodied practices, intergenerational care and long-standing relationships with land and materials. Though the grandmother is positioned as a custodian of knowledge and the grandchild as her recipient, the programme’s speakers made it clear that they too have become custodians in their own right, as they imparted lessons upon the audience. We exist in a cycle of simultaneous existence as both student and teacher, where rematriation as a reclamation system ensures this continuity for generations to come.