A Troubled Homeland Embodied in a Bag of Chickpeas

This article is part of our Design special section about how food inspires designers to make and do surprising things.

In 2019, Jessy Slim, a Lebanese American designer, had just started a graduate architecture program at the Cranbrook Academy of Arka in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., when protests erupted in her birthplace, Beirut.

That October, thousands took to the streets in a revolt against the Lebanese government, a movement that ultimately led to the installation earlier this year of a new prime minister and president. Ms. Slim followed the unrest closely, while searching for a way to participate from a distance. To do so, she turned to a foodstuff emblematic of Lebanon: chickpeas.

“When I moved to Michigan, the first place that I explored outside of Cranbrook was Dearborn, where there are thousands of Middle Easterners,” said Ms. Slim, 34, who immigrated to San Diego from Beirut with her mother and stepfather when she was 10 years old, and now lives in Oakland, Calif., with her husband, Chris DeHenzel.

“It’s almost like a mirror of what’s happening in Lebanon,” Ms. Slim said of her creations. “The economic crisis and all the issues compounding there were traced in that material.”Credit…Chris DeHenzel

“One day, I went and bought a 50-pound bag of chickpeas, brought it back to the studio, and sat with it for a while,” she said. Eventually, she transformed the legumes into clay.

“I basically made hummus and then put it in the oven,” she recounted. Over the next few months, Ms. Slim hand-built and baked a series of Lebanese coffee ceremony objects, including a pot, cup and serving tray. She also made a small hanging sculpture from a chickpea textile she created by painting the legumes onto a gauze-like fabric. She mixed additives into the clay, including sand, glue and hibiscus, exploring how they affected its look, smell and performance.