Moulding Home is a petit psycho-geographic practice about home through craft and cookery. This hands-on project encouraged the participants to carve out the memories and meaning of home into this ma’amoul mould and share the stories through a hospitable tea party, tasting biscuits made out of these special moulds. While many mean a home as a place for gathering and resting and hence the kitchen & bedroom are significant spaces to make it home, people with refuge experience identify home with a sense of safety.

Ma’amoul is an ancient biscuit, stuffed with dried dates paste and chopped nuts. Heavenly smells of spices and roast nuts and big family gatherings for making hundreds of ma’amouls together are sheer memories embedded to this Arabic yum. Whether Easter or Ramadan, any crucial celebration cannot be completed without ma’amoul in the Levantine region of Middle East including Syria. The cultural significance of ma’amoul is captured in one article from Forbes: ‘Ruwaida and her family escaped the civil war in 2012 by walking to Jordan, carrying everything they could. Ruwaida wore bracelets and chains around her neck, knowing she would need to sell them to survive. Four years later, when they came to the United States the only thing she had left from that journey was a wooden cookie mould her mother used to teach her how to bake traditional Syrian cookies.’ It is quite incredible that a ma’amoul mould is one of the items that a Syrian mother carried through extremely difficult times and kept it all the way to her new home.

* Part of Great Get Together, remembering Jo Cox @ Rich Mix, Collaboration with Kirsti Davies