Moasherat معاشرات

Within the exhibition of our Labo*r project, Fehras Publishing Practices invite you into a library under the title „Wheat Flower“ where you can explore how culture became a verb in LOTUS, the publishing legacy of the Afro-Asian Solidarity Movement. In the library, they move the spotlight over to those who labour in culturing.

This installation will be activated on the 22nd of August, as the ecliptic transitions from Leo to Wheat Flower (سنبله): We invite you to join us for a gathering called Moasherat. For this special night, we will prepare a laborious dish from the night before called Hareesa (Arabic: هریسة, Turkish: Ashure, Farsi: حلیم). We want to celebrate the month of Harvest with a love letter to our beloved cultural workers, ending the night with a listening session and vinyl stories.

Fehras Publishing Practices understands how mingling horizontally offers a prospect of liberation and therefore embraces a tradition of sharing bread and salt, called Moasherat (Arabic: معاشرة, Azerbaijani: müaşirət, Farsi: معاشرت, Turkish: muaşeret). For us, Moasherat inspires companionship and social intercourse. It is a cultural practice that cuts across societal and cultural lines, invoking vertical and horizontal solidarity. It is a way of provincializing History. We want to unmark imperial boundaries. Moasherat seeks to offer the agency to confront the oppressive weight of imperial memory in post-migrant societies and to counter autochthony and the myth of origins. We understand limits not as barriers but as meeting points akin to its root limus, meaning transverse or oblique.