A Recipe for Hosting: Tamara Al-Mashouk and Joanna Jones
The DOVER Urban Room
Counterpoint Arts and Dover Arts Development presented:
A Recipe for Hosting: Memory, Pleasure and Home by Tamara Al-Mashouk and Joanna Jones
On Thursday July 21st 2022 at 18:00 – 21:00
An evening of food, dialogue and 12 people in the Urban room.
The day started with Joanna and Tamara meeting at the Dover International Supermarket that has quite recently opened in Pencester Rd in Dover. This supermarket is a welcome addition to Dover, it has very friendly and knowlegable staff and offers an amazing variety of food from all over the world. Here we found all the Arab ingredients that we needed for the evening’s dinner that we were going to prepare together under Tamara’s guidance.
- Thank you for a lovely night last night!! Amazing company, conversation and food.
- What a lovely, thought-provoking and enjoyable evening I’d had on Thursday. As a collaboration between the two of you I found it really stimulating and fresh – and also incredibly comfortable, as if you had known each other and worked together for years. There were so many interesting threads and connections that I’m sure will resonate for a long time – some in practical ways, others less tangibly.
- ……….such a wonderful, inspiring and fascinating feast in every sense.
- Dear joanna & tamara, thank you – it was a very memorable day of joyful preparation and a fascinating, condensed evening of conversation. many impressions linger on, especially surrounding the perception of otherness and prejudice.
- The food and conversations we had were really brilliant, and even more so because it was a total surprise to me: I had decided not to look at the program in order to be fully present, there and then, with you all. Thank you so much for being a warm and welcoming host and for telling us so much about Dover. My perspective has widened. Our time together felt very precious and inspiring.
I came back home with a lot of images and ideas! - It seems we’ve all been feeling quite full by the evening we hosted! Such a beautiful evening.
- A glorious day – the making of the food and the conversation around the table was profound and beautifully complex with all that was brought to it.
Dover was the trigger for so many different experiences:
– from growing up with parents working for border control in Dover whose job over the years moved from controlling alcohol and drug smuggling to people smuggling. They received no additional training for this and found it sometimes quite over whelming.
– the sense of achievement and elation of actually reaching your goal, after many months, sometimes years, of trying to reach Dover.
– anxiety triggered at border control – the knowledge that ones skin colour, hair type and name will single one out to be waved though or taken to the side and that there is no way around this. You can’t even be angry, you just have to take it.
– a place of arrival and departure that is desirable for some is terrifying for others – the evening made this tangible through discussions about the white cliffs and the Citadel in Dover.
