Miriam Hillawi Abraham | Mythos & Materia: Eating the/each Other

Borrowing its subtitle from bell hooks’ “Eating The Other,” this work is an exploration of materials, matter, and mythos. bell hooks describes a post-colonial asymmetric exchange of power and desire wherein the Other is called upon “to both witness and participate” in the transformation of the colonial or imperial figure. So, with regards to encounters between humans and non-human entities, this desire to eat or possess another body is a process of absorbing power. This work is concerned with these metabolic transformations that take place between intelligent beings, both human and otherwise.

“I am only concerned with what is not mine.”

Oswald de Andrade, “Anthropophagic Manifesto”

“Mythos & Materia” is concerned with the ‘extra-mundane,’ that which exists beyond the material world—salt, honey, wax, propolis, gum, tallow, and herb.

Throughout human history, we have endowed these living materials with an additional sense of livingness via our extraction and cultivation for both practical and ritualistic purposes. We not only masticate and metabolize them to absorb their potency, but we also exalt them in ritual and myth.

Materials such as these map a spectral geography, charting invisible linkages as they are carried across political and corporeal boundaries, loaded into caravans, windswept, and replanted elsewhere since time immemorial.

Following a recent research residency in Cairo, Abraham was initially interested in the shared material cultures surrounding honey and other bee products between Ethiopia and Egypt, from antiquity to today, tracing their uses, from the embalming of the dead in Ancient Egypt to the brewing of Tej (honey wine) for nobility in the Ethiopian highlands. She regarded traditional beekeeping as an age-old form of human-to-non-human mutualism and codependence, or rather, co-production. Yet the lines of inquiry extend beyond these Nile territories and stretch across the Mediterranean, skimming water, blurring timelines, and grazing the spirit realm.

What would it mean to build with or against another living, intelligent thing? To intervene within or redirect its processes and lifeworlds, much like a beekeeper would with their hive.

Abraham’s material explorations began with beeswax, propolis, Arabic Gum (Gum Acacia from the African Sahel), and Kaff-e-Maryam (Anastatica hierochuntica), a resurrection plant used as a herbal remedy for labor pains and as a ‘vegetable hygrometer’ by nomadic peoples in the Sahara. Yet through new encounters and investigations at the Onassis AiR residency, this list will grow to include other living materials.

This research will culminate in an encyclopedic publication on ‘living materials’ (extra-mundane) traditionally used in cuisine, architecture, and ritual, tracing ‘spectral geographies’ of unseen worlds across the Horn of Africa, the Red Sea, and the Mediterranean.

This format draws inspiration in part from Ethiopian divination and amulet scrolls, as well as from various ‘materia medica’ from medieval Egypt, China (“Bencao Gangmu”), and Ancient and Classical Greece. ‘Materia medica’ refers to a historical pharmaceutical compendium of botanical and medicinal remedies and descriptions, gaining its name from Ancient Greek physician Pedanius Dioscorides and his work,“De materia medica,” from the 1st century AD.

Mythos will be materialized in this exploration through relation, haunting, and contradiction. And through learning, honoring, and reviving living materials, the aim is to build an emergent practice of remembrance and resistance to counter ecocide and the violence of territories.