Farida Rady

four years ago today, I photographed Jess as she baked with whole grains and shared stories about her grandma. Jess told me about the connections between colonialism and white flour, and I learned that the first bread was made in the Levant, specifically in Palestine and Jordan, 14,000 years ago. In July 2024, Jess published Rise, a narrative cookbook devoted to whole grains, intertwined with stories of family and food politics, and I’m grateful that some of the photographs I made that day are in the book. In Egyptian Arabic, the word for “bread” - عيش - also means “life.” Love for the hands that plant, harvest, process, knead, and bake 🌾🤲🏽

diptychs with my beloved grandpa ⭐️ photos he made in Algeria (early 1970s) on the top // photos I made in Toronto & Tbilisi (2022) below 🎞️

in December, I found a camera my grandma bought from Japan to gift my mom. It lay unopened in our family home for thirty+ years. Thinking about: how this camera moved from Japan —> Cairo —> Abu Dhabi —> Toronto & all the hands that touched it on the way, the act of/intention behind gifting someone a camera, and a gift unopened, or perhaps not quite received, for decades, until it skips a generation & lands in my hands. Still feeling disillusioned with the image & unsure how to engage, but here are quick shots from my test roll on Ilford HP5 & a scan of the camera box.

some things I made in January: 1. a lumen print of snow, fixed in melted snow & salt, overlaid with a photo of the clouds the next day ❄️ 2. 2026 calendar 🗓️ 3. zine bound from a cyanotype I made on January 1, 2023 🖇️ 4. journal entry from a snowy walk 🌀 5. a Cala Lilly pin 🧷

thinking about this horse encounter ~ had some fun with this one image 🐎 🫆 from a visit to Meg in Treaty 6, june 2024

in 2025, I read more than ever before. I thought about access to books, public knowledge, collective learning, and leveraging my institutional access & training. I also thought about the hidden labour of maintaining libraries, and how librarians (in all shapes and forms) have tended to knowledge for thousands of years. I think especially about libraries that are less resourced, and collections of books in unconventional spaces - how they may be tended to with intention, or accumulate haphazardly over time, or unexpectedly hold books that cannot be found elsewhere. In 2026, I hope to visit more libraries (if you love a particular one, let’s go together). Here are some of the collections of books I’ve encountered over the last year: 2-4: Nile Museum, Aswan 5: my mom & her mom’s engineering books, our home in Cairo 6: reproduction of Al-Idrisi’s map of the world (1154) in the Bibliotheca Alexandrina (massive online collection, free to access for all) 7: fascinating to see in person - a volume of the Description De L’Égypte (1809-1829) held at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina & fundamental to orientalist discourse 8-9: @athar_lina - Cairo 10-11: @takiyyatmusafir - Cairo 12: self explanatory ‼️

1-3: a flower from the flamboyant tree/flame of the forest near our house, scanned and printed 12 times. June 2022, Abu Dhabi. 4 & 5: fallen flowers from the same tree, scanned. June 2025, Abu Dhabi. ❤️‍🔥

on the first day of spring this year, as part of the 31st eco-arts fest, fugitive ecologies, curated by @liiiisamy and @chronicallyfluid , I facilitated a phytogram workshop at the stong house, which we are now at risk of losing. there was much to engage with and complicate, as this 19th-century house symbolized early settlement and Indigenous dispossession. through Lisa and Hatem’s thoughtful curation and participants’ creative interventions, the stong house was re-situated as place to unlearn settler logics of permanence and instead embrace fugitive possibilities 🕸️ over the year, professor Lisa Myers generously led the transformation of the stong house into a collaborative creative community for workshops, exhibitions, and research space, centering Indigenous curatorial practice and land-based pedagogy. because of the York University administration’s neglect of its infrastructure, Lisa has been displaced from this research space, and we may lose access to this generative and unique space. Lisa has started a petition - open to folks both within and outside the York U community - link in bio! 🔗

Join us for the third session of “terrain and text” facilitated by @farida.archives next week Tuesday Oct 21st at 6-8:30pm at @baaa______baaa - a series of reading group discussions hosted by Farida Rady where we engage with various lines of geographic thought. Collectively, we traverse a range of texts bound together by a critical spatial approach. Topics include legal geographies, power and state formation, land politics and migration, urban rights and resistance, and creative praxis. Pre-reading is highly encouraged, and discussions will be casual and informal. - The third session of terrain and text focuses on abolition geography and considers “freedom as a place,” as Ruth Wilson Gilmore teaches us. We will take a closer look at the spatial and geographic applications of an abolitionist framework. What does abolition look like in practice, on the ground? Why are declarations of “innocence” counter-intuitive to the project of abolition? What do we mean when we say abolition is presence, not absence? Rather than focusing exclusively on prison abolition, we will follow Gilmore’s lead and discuss how people make freedom and imagine home against the gears of racial capitalism and imperialism on multiple scales and fronts. The text will be emailed to registrants ahead of the session, and a few printed copies will be available. - When: Tuesday, Oct 21st. Doors open at 6:00PM, discussion begins at 6:30PM sharp, and ends by 8:30PM. - 🔗 link in bio to register and for more details limited capacity free of charge but donations appreciated

my parents at a salt lake on the last day of 2021, on Ilford HP5 〰️

Join us for the second session of “terrain and text” facilitated by @farida.archives next week Tuesday Sept 2nd at 6-8:30pm at @baaa______baaa - a series of reading group discussions hosted by Farida Rady where we engage with various lines of geographic thought. Collectively, we traverse a range of texts bound together by a critical spatial approach. Topics include legal geographies, power and state formation, land politics and migration, urban rights and resistance, and creative praxis. Pre-reading is highly encouraged, and discussions will be casual and informal. - The second session of terrain and text focuses on land as pedagogy, context, and process, as Leanne Betasamosake Simpson writes. The word “land” is used often in geographic and spatial work, but when we use the word “land,” what do we mean? We will take a closer look at the ideological work this word does. Rather than focusing on the centrality of land dispossession to colonial projects, we will instead discuss land-based learning as a rejection of colonial education systems, as a prerequisite for Indigenous resurgence and nation-building, and as a fundamental site of transformative education for all. The texts will be emailed to registrants ahead of the session, and a few printed copies will be available. - When: Tuesday, Sept 2nd. Doors open at 6:00PM, discussion begins at 6:30PM sharp, and ends by 8:30PM. - 🔗 link in bio to register and for more details limited capacity free of charge but donations appreciated

too much of everything ~ some prayers from my homelands to yours, from last august 🕯️