Tsawwar… Thalia Bassim
"We drove up to Chester, New York in September to spend the day harvesting mloukhiyyeh on a Lebanese friend’s farm, handpicking leaves she had taken such good care of. The plants had been grown from Palestinian seeds preserved through a seed bank, now rooted in a small plot of land in upstate New York. It was deeply grounding to see these plants thrive so far from where they came from, carried across borders and generations by people determined not to let certain tastes, smells, and memories disappear.
Our farmer friend has been cultivating seeds from different parts of the region with so much care and patience, building a living archive in the soil. I was so happy to recently contribute to this exchange by bringing seeds from a seed bank in Lebanon, and I’m excited to watch them grow. What stayed with me most was the tenderness of it all: the passing of seeds from hand to hand; the slowness of harvesting together; the feeling that preservation can sometimes look like a basket overflowing with mloukhiyyeh leaves on an ordinary afternoon."
Thalia Bassim is a visual artist, storyteller, and communications specialist based between New York City and Beirut. Her multidisciplinary practice combines analog photography, writing, performance, and digital experimentation, including AI-generated imagery, to explore food, culture, memory, and identity. Thalia’s work highlights the intimate moments that connect people to place, blending meticulous observation with experimentation and capturing both the sensory and narrative layers of everyday life.
Tsawwar is an ongoing visual series in Daftar which explores the stories behind a photograph, taken in the region or by an Arab photographer, written in their own words.
