Funneling Resistance

Olive oil is a powerful symbol of Palestine, found in homes and institutions throughout the Palestinian diaspora. It is associated with Palestinian identity, politics, suffering and Israeli occupation. The oil provides a direct link to a stolen and lost home

Mahmoud Darwish writes about Palestinian olive oil: If the oil trees knew the hands that planted them their oil would become tears.25

Many of the displaced Palestinians interviewed for this research import olive oil directly from their homeland in large tin containers. My grandmother imports these tins and stores them out of sight, in a dark cupboard. She brings them out only long enough to pour the oil from the tins into smaller containers, for daily use, using a plastic funnel. 

 From there, she pours the oil into an even smaller container, which sits on her dresser. She keeps it handy so she can massage olive oil into her joints, to alleviate pain. It is a ritual she inherited from her mother but adapted to her current situation in the diaspora. Being away from her homeland, she must now import large quantities of olive oil, which last an extended period of time, but which come in unwieldy cans. 

To memorialize my grandmother’s ritual of pouring out the Palestinian olive oil, I designed a set of three vessels. The vessel bodies are made of clear glass to showcase the oil’s clarity—a key indicator of quality. The central blue glass piece is a dual-facing funnel. With each vessel, the funnel facilitates the pouring of oil from the tin container, or a larger size vessel, into a smaller one. The blue glass funnel can also be flipped, to form a nozzle, used to pour oil out from each vessel. The largest vessel is for storing oil, the medium size is for cooking, and the smallest is for the bedroom. Once all three vessels are filled, the funnels are capped with a clear glass top.