dima

  • METACΠΟΡΑ ΙΙ [Collective research, multimedia installations and gatherings] 2024–2025

    The Post Collective: Mirra Markhaëva and Elli Vassalou, in collaboration with Anna Housiada

    The Post Collective was one of three collectives invited to a year-long residency for Kunst & Zwalm 2025, curated by Kunstenplatform PLAN B around the theme of ground. Metaspora II explores how people inhabit and form relationships with places that are not their birthlands. Bringing together different diasporic and spiritual backgrounds, the project works with food, storytelling and ritual to create hybrid localities and imagine forms of belonging beyond separate diasporic communities.

    This chapter centres on wheat and its entanglements with migration, worship and colonialism. Seeds and recipes travel through commerce, displacement and conquest, adapting to new soils and transforming the communities that receive them. Bread carries histories of struggle and hunger, community and nourishment, religious ritual and daily habit. Its offering becomes a language of hospitality, solidarity, care and remembrance, honouring the dead and the labour that brings food to our tables.

    In collaboration with the millers of the IJzerkotmolen and inhabitants of Zwalm, we organised gatherings around practices and holy days connected to wheat. Making Buryat-Mongolian buuz dumplings and preparing kolyva for Ψυχοσάββατο—the commemoration of the dead—opened spaces for sharing stories, recipes and ancestral memories. Historical research meets embodied knowledge transmitted through cooking, eating and gathering, bringing our own cultural practices into relation with the land we inhabit.

    In July 2025, the research travelled to Athens with a gathering at Athens Insider Collective, part of In a Bright Green Field, curated by Gary Carrion-Murayari and organised by the DESTE Foundation, the New Museum and the Benaki Museum. Inspired by the Pontic recipe for manti, brought to Greece by Anatolian refugees a century ago, the gathering blended food-making, storytelling and critical dialogue. Centring migrant artists’ voices, we explored how Greek cultural institutions engage with migrant and minoritarian knowledge. What terms of “hospitality” do migrant artists encounter in Greece today? What spaces can host us, and what spaces can we create ourselves? How can we form sustainable coalitions amid fascism, ethnic cleansing and racism? The event was a spin-off of Mirra Markhaëva’s Dumpling Tales.

    In Zwalm, the research developed into Metasporic Goddesses: From Ma to Mother Mary, a multimedia installation inside a chapel and a collective procession. Following the transformations of Mother Goddess worship and its connections with the agricultural calendar, the work brought Mary of the Seven Sorrows and Mary of the First Seed into dialogue with Buryat shamanistic and Buddhist practices. Working with local farmers, millers and craftspeople, we created a ritual of offering bread, stamped with an original seal welcoming Mother Goddesses and blessing humans and non-humans alike. The procession connected with the elements, plants, animals and people of Zwalm, blessing the soil for the new sowing season.

    Metaspora challenges narratives of cultural purity while examining how colonialism and industrial agriculture reshape land, labour and spiritual life. Through collective practices, it asks how we can sustain relationships with soil and seed across displacement, resist the commodification of inherited knowledge, and claim the right to flourish far from our birthlands.

    Residencies, gatherings and exhibitions

    Publication

    Metaspora — Kunst en Zwalm 2025: “Grond” — accompanying zine. Risoprint: nadine; handprinted by Atelier V.V.

    Supported by Kunstenplatform PLAN B, Kunst en Zwalm, nadine and Kunstencentrum VIERNULVIER.

    With thanks to IJzerkotmolen, Atelier V.V., De Goede Zaak, Natuurfarm Bos t’Ename, BOEM vzw, Klein Zwitserland, Aslı Hatipoğlu, Juliette Mourad and Natalia Shipieva.

    Photography: Leontien Allemeersch (Kunstenplatform PLAN B), Anna Scholiers, Asma Lajimi, Dhiaa Biya and Georgios Athanasiou, Elli Vassalou.