The Edible Library with Moza Almatrooshi brings reading and eating to the same table. It translates research into something to be handled, tasted and talked through together, pairing printed material with a menu and ingredient-based culinary translation.

Centred on honey, this session explores what happens when domestic bees are integrated with wild ones, and what that means for the future of beekeeping. Moza sets out printed matter alongside food, inviting participants to engage with the texts, encounter the subject through taste, and think collectively about how the present state of agriculture can be documented and what more sustainable practices might look like.

Maktaba: A Speculative Thought Circle is a monthly gathering dedicated to collective reading, viewing, and discussion across disciplines. Rooted in the Arabic word for "library," Maktaba takes the form of an open and horizontal learning environment where participants gather around a roundtable to reflect on texts and artistic practices, from exhibitions, books, film, and image, performance and sound, considering the ways they speak to one another and what we might speculate from them.

All texts and/or bodies of work for each Maktaba Circle are shared prior to our meeting. Each participant is encouraged to familiarize themselves with the material, annotate, and bring their own references and offerings to each session. 

Accessibility & Participation

Language: English and Arabic

About the Instructor

Moza Almatrooshi is an artist and chef based in the UAE. Her practice operates at the intersection of food, agriculture, and site-responsive research, using eating as both method and medium. She holds an MFA in Fine Arts from the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL (London), and a Diploma in Patisserie from ICCA (Dubai). Working across installation, public programmes, and culinary formats, Almatrooshi approaches food as a material through which ecological, social, and historical relations are activated. Her work often emerges through sustained engagement with landscapes, including practices of foraging, sourcing, and working alongside local forms of knowledge. Through her landscape-to-table culinary studio ballad, she develops projects that translate artistic research into shared, edible encounters. These projects foreground the entanglements between land, labour, and nourishment, positioning the table as a site of collective attention, transmission, and care.

Ballad is an art and culinary studio founded by Moza Almatrooshi. Its practice unfolds through landscape-to-table hospitality, using food, hosting, and collective eating as research methods. Operating across the Hajar Mountains in the UAE and Oman, ballad develops site-responsive programmes, journeys, and gatherings that engage directly with land, seasonality, and local ecologies. These projects often take the form of narrativised menus and shared table formats, where artistic research is activated through preparation, assembly, and eating. ballad’s methodology is shaped through long-term relationships with farmers, botanists, beekeepers, and those whose knowledge emerges from sustained symbiosis with the land. Through these exchanges, ballad offers a platform for site-responsive hospitality, artistic collaboration, & active knowledge circularity within the land-based communities it works with.