"Metti is Rentseeking" by Waèl el Allouche

"Metti is Rentseeking" is an informal social chain, beginning from the Tunisian soil and ending as a market stall at dappermarkt. It starts with a simple gesture: importing 100 kilos of handmade harissa from Tunisia, made by partly by my family and others within the social chain, and selling it at the Dappermarkt in Amsterdam. But this act is layered with resistance, care, and critique. The harissa is not just food—it is a form of memory, labor, and survival passed through generations. The market becomes a stage for informal economies, diasporic exchange, and reclaiming value from colonial systems that have extracted without giving back.

This work responds to the idea of rent seeking—benefiting without contributing—by doing the opposite. Metti inserts value into community systems, not institutional ones. Named after my grandmother, Metti is a mythic figure of softness and solidarity, the keeper of our recipes and the architect of our survival. Alongside the market is The Kitchen, a second environment where stories, legends, and inventions are preserved—not behind glass, but in use. It is an anti-museum, a space where history is still warm, still cooking, still changing hands.

Here, archiving is not passive—it is active, daily, and defiant. Whether it’s a jar of harissa or a whispered recipe, the knowledge lives in motion. Metti Harrissa is one idea among many—part of a wider network of potential inventions, rituals, and gestures meant to be reactivated by others.

At its core, Metti Harrissa questions what is allowed to circulate and accumulate in our systems—who gets to extract, and who is erased. In economic terms, rent seeking is the act of extracting value without giving anything back to society. This logic underpins colonialism, modernism, and much of the formal art world. Metti reclaims that term, not to perform corruption, but to expose it. Through small-scale trade, storytelling, and ancestral recipes, I propose another economy—one that is peer-to-peer, relational, and rooted in love and defiance. The aim is to create an informal chain from supplier, transporter and the seller.

This project is a continuation of Metti, a growing initiative grounded in food, heritage, and shared knowledge. It is named after my grandmother, and carries with it the solidarity and improvisation of generations of women who laboured to feed, nurture, and remember. The harissa itself is a sculpture, but also a portal: it is handmade, time-consuming, and resistant to mass production. It tastes like survival. To sell it at the market is not to commercialize it, but to insert it into an ecosystem of exchange that refuses institutional containment.