Tomatoes, Fibreglass and the Persistence of the Human
Textual commission, For magazine and exhibition space, publication No. 4 Local Origins, Propaganda, Persistence 2023 (as part of the exhibition “The six hundred seventy four forms and a dragon” by Yasmine El Meleegy)
By Ismail Fayed
Tomato and Fibreglass
By all accounts tomatoes did not enter into the world cuisine (Europe, the Middle East, and Asia) before the 18th C. Despite being described in detail by the early Spanish conquistadors when they encountered it in South America in the 16th C, and being brought to Europe and cultivated decades after that (1). It would take at least two hundred years (if not more) before the vegetable acquires its current global status, from China all the way to North Africa. And yet its meteoric rise as a staple vegetable for millions of people is a testament to the impact of capitalist circulation of goods, culture and value. That meteoric rise also entailed intensive cultivation methods that altered the natural variety of tomatoes but also its shape, size and flavour. Tomatoes became more uniform, sweeter and of a much more homogenous colour than its natural, wild variety.
Around the same time the use of fibreglass would be discovered, first to make plastic wool (fabrics mainly), and a few decades later the material as we know it today will be discovered by accident in 1932 (2). Predictably it will be first used in war applications (that is how technology always evolves, militaristic needs drive innovations in ways nothing else can) and by the mid-1950s the use will extend to applications that are not war related, in everything from boats to cars to public sculpture. But the history of how fibreglass evolved is very similar to the history of how tomatoes became a global crop. Capitalism always tries to find ways to make things easier, and mass produced, eliminating difference that cannot add direct value for consumption. A more durable and cheaper alternative to metal, fibreglass became ideal in mass production. The same way that specific varieties of tomatoes were cultivated to appeal in very specific ways to the largest number of consumers (eliminating along the way the natural diversity of tomatoes).
Yasmine El Meelegy’s work explores the afterlives of objects that impart vital significance to its owners and users, and that cross the line between the public and private, the domestic and the industrial, the use value and the “invaluable”. As she plays with the formal qualities of certain objects she exposes those many dichotomies inherent in them, and along the way open the possibility of rethinking how we relate to these objects and their materiality. We, as audience, are then confronted with our limits in understanding how these objects are constituted and what are the possible ways to engage with them. These dichotomies, in the context of Egypt, govern our relationship to all kinds of objects around us, and the space that they occupy. And those relationships are constrained in visible and invisible ways. This begs the question how can we understand individual autonomy and subjectivity even within the confines of those powerful dichotomies. More so, when we understand that people are not just empty receptacles of the machinations of power. Despite seemingly being governed by regimes of power (political, juridical, corporal,...etc), Egyptians still find ways to to redefine and reconstitute their autonomy and subjectivity in alternative ways. And that can be reflected in social scores where certain roles are performed but also in spatial strategies and object use.
In the work of scholar Anny Gaul (3), she investigates how Egyptian women in the last six decades after independence, claimed a certain kind of sovereignty over their domestic space and their food choices. Specifically by looking at how Egyptian women appropriated tomatoes as an essential ingredient in everyday cooking (tomatoes were not popular in Egypt before the 19thC) . Anny’s work is focused more on the way women responded to the new realities of post-independence and the shift in centralising certain aspects of agrarian planning to grow certain crops at specific times and hence eliminating a certain freedom over food choices and availability of certain crops. That is one facet of this notion of control, use and creative adaptation in the performance of ideal domesticity and the ideal subject.
Satellite image showing loss of farmland in the Egyptian Delta. Image retrieved from NASA’s Earth Observatory, all rights reserved to copyright holders
The centre and the margin
And yet despite the immense level of state control and escalating repression since independence and the rise of the police state during the reign of Mubarak (1981-2011), Egyptians still found ways to not only reclaim space, but how they control and use objects. Nothing makes that so clear as the expanding urban sprawl of informal settlement from the Nile delta (mainly) and other parts of Egypt during the last five decades. As informal housing took over legal and formal housing from the 1960s onwards (4). Up until the time of agrarian reform (1952) and the construction of the High Dam, majority of Egyptian farmers held little plots of land that followed the flood cycles of the Nile, in growing seasonal crops and tiny parcels of land that were used for crops that were easy to grow and would not require intensive farming (sweet potato, broad beans, …etc). Despite the land reform, land fragmentation would continue to plague Egyptian farmland up to the point that massive loss of historical farmland has reached more than 12% annually (1994-2015) (5) compared to rise in urbanisation (more than 100% in the Delta over the same period) (6). This is of course due to agricultural policies that do not take into consideration the interests and livelihood of Egyptian farmers, who since the 1970s found it much more lucrative to sell their farmland as potential land for housing, instead of farming. The downside of a highly centralised system of planning, that systematically undermines the margins, is that the margins come to the centre. And that is one key strategy that we can take from the reality of Egyptians over the post-independence period.
Theatrical release poster of al-aqmar (so-called after a mosque with the same name), directed by Hisham Abo El Nasr in 1978- the poster image was retrieved from elcinema.com under fair use terms
The persistence of the personal
Attempts to regulate and consolidate the circulation of food, specifically fresh produce go back to the 20thC, with the establishing of Rod El-Farag wholesale market in 1947 (7). And the establishment of agricultural cooperatives after 1952 and even later with the establishment of Obour Market, the benchmark for setting the vegetable and fruits prices in Egypt, in 1992 (8). The pressure to modernise and commercialise the circulation of fresh produce was tackled in many cinematic representations, an artistic treatment that also raises questions on the way we understand space and what objects circulate through it and the relationship we have with that space. By the late 1970s it was evident that “informal” markets and conventional modes of distribution of fresh produce were already being threatened. Such films as al-aqmar (1978), Gida’an bab al-sha’riyya (the good ones from bab al-sha’riyya) (1983), al-gamaliyya (1984), all are named after and reference historical districts in Islamic Cairo that were the bastions of traditional trade and communal modes of exchange and economy. The films all depict very similar stories of how these communities were under immense pressure of the neoliberal reforms and economic restructuring (late 1970s throughout the 1980s) that threatened their livelihood and autonomy. What endures in the public imagination, till today, is the vitality and inter-personal nature of such micro-economies, of minor fruit and vegetable sellers, or simple street vendors, or daily itinerant farmers who sell their produce on street corners (till today). And that brings us to our second key strategy, the enduring social nature of the possibilities of exchange even when large capitalist developments wipe out most of these small scale productions. As humans we are still affected by the potential inter-personal exchange with others, which in turn teaches us something about the ethics of exchange.
Telling a story
I began this text by showing the historical trajectory of how both tomatoes and fibreglass underwent significant transformation till they were both standardised and mass produced for almost limitless consumption. But what happens when even further commodification of nature and what nature is, goes further than what is humanly imagined (patenting seed as intellectual copyrights) and redefines “the natural” altogether? And what happens when what first developed as a possible war technology goes further than what was originally intended (fibreglass or even the internet for that matter)?
Here lies the third key strategy, the potential that lies latent to creative thinking which can be used in paradoxical and many times self-contradictory ways.
Yasmeen’s displacement process reimagines “future” tomatoes, playing with the materiality of the tomato itself, as it becomes more and more “artificial” (a reference to the continued genetic modification process of most basic crops). Through using fibreglass it represents this final transformation of this contested object. Fibreglass itself a material that has been and continues to be mass produced, although the material is not biodegradable or recyclable. This in turn highlights the question of the natural and the synthetic and the transient nature of wild varieties of crops versus the more “stable” shelf life of their genetically modified avatars.
The nascent grassroot movement of food sovereignty in Egypt (in stark distinction to the state’s policy of food security) is definitely the margin making its way to the centre. In the way that the gallery is a public space where a possible exchange about how transgenic patented seeds will alter natural diversity of basic crops in Egypt. Or even if Egyptians (aside from the farmers themselves) are aware of how seed monopolies are changing the nature, composition and materiality of the food they are consuming.
The way in which informality intersects with and pushes back on centralised planning and governance in Egypt, and the way in which conventional modes of exchange endure in face of ever specialised and divided labour, all point out to the way in which different performances of resistance evolve even when they are least expected. Through mirroring those different strategies and extending them we can recreate a potential social place, where artworks are reconstituted to a scale and form that raises questions, bringing back the second key strategy, the endurance of the inter-personal. Through playing with the materiality of the object and the associations we have with it, the artwork creates the possibility of questioning. As an audience we are no longer just shopping from an impersonal, massive chain supermarket, but switching to personable encounter, coming face to face with the object itself. By using the industrial capitalist machine against itself, we once again come to realise what is at stake in the ethics of exchange and consumption. And that we are not just receptacles of the machinations of power, but for the moments we encounter an artwork, the human, still persists.
(1) William Alexander, Ten Tomatoes that Changed the World: A History, Hachette, 2022
(2) NIHF inductee Dale Kleist invented fiberglass material. NIHF Inductee Dale Kleist Invented Fiberglass Material. (n.d.). https://www.invent.org/inductees/dale-kleist#:~:text=An%20accidental%20discovery%20made%20by,%2C%20refrigerators%2C%20and%20furnaces%20affordable.
(3) Gaul, Anny. “Revolutionary landscapes and kitchens of refusal: Tomato sauce and sovereignty in Egypt.” Gender & History, vol. 34, no. 3, 2022, pp. 789–809, https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0424.12665.
(4) The History of Informal Settlements by Marion Séjourné in Kipper, Regina, et al. “The History of Informal Settlements by Marion Séjourné.” Cairo’s Informal Areas - between Urban Challenges and Hidden Potentials: Facts, Voices, Visions, GTZ, Cairo, 2009.
(5) Radwan, Taher M., et al. “Dramatic loss of agricultural land due to urban expansion threatens food security in the Nile Delta, Egypt.” Remote Sensing, vol. 11, no. 3, 2019, p. 332, https://doi.org/10.3390/rs11030332.
(6) Ibid
(7) محمد علي زيدان، سوق روض الفرج من سوق الفتوة إلى قصر ثقافة، موقع جريدة الوطن، ٣١ مارس ٢٠١٣ - https://www.elwatannews.com/news/details/156402
(8) Market Spaces: Merchants Battle the Economic Narratives of Development Experts (pp. 371-392) Jörg Gertel in Cairo Contested: Governance, Urban Space, and Global Modernity, American University in Cairo Press, Cairo, 2011.