KOUSKSY INVESTIGATION
Once again invited by Les Grandes Tables, we returned to Marseille to participate in the fifth edition of the KoussKouss Festival. Embedded within the Plan d’Aou neighborhood, home to a large Maghrebi diaspora, we joined the community in questioning what makes couscous one of the top favorite dishes across France. A zine was created to present the results of this playful ‘investigation,’ which explored the various activities organized by the neighborhood's community groups.
Local librarians brought together children of the neighborhood to hear and share stories related to food, cooking, and heritage. Women from the neighborhood brought and shared peppery (some spicy, some not) recipes from their homelands in Tunisia, Algeria, Kabyle, Morocco, and Comoros. As a group of women residents catered for the festival, we asked about their relationships to cooking food from home in Marseille, their opinions on different regional styles of cooking, their favorite tastes, and how they look to the future of feeding their families and their communities.
Questions woven throughout the zine: What are the prejudices and taboos surrounding the different ways of preparing and consuming couscous? How does memory influence taste and cooking? What are the ways that food knowledge is passed down and shared inter-regionally and intergenerationally? The “KOUSKSY INVESTIGATION” zine shares moments of open questioning and joyful sharing.
Initiated with the financial support of Goethe-Institut Tunesien