Olive Oil for Palestine
2026
Olive Oil for Palestine is a community-led olive preservation project tracing a journey from mapping overlooked urban olive trees in Naarm (Melbourne) through harvesting, pressing and bottling, to replanting.
Olive trees are an abundant yet largely unnoticed crop across Naarm, carrying traces of migration, settlement and cultural change. Countless stories of migration have brought olive trees to these lands, creating a living archive of cultural memory, care and belonging.
During the 2026 harvest, Playte worked with local communities to map and harvest urban olive trees, collecting 480kg of olives across Naarm. The harvest was pressed at Long Road Olive Grove into 120 individually labelled bottles of olive oil. The bottle’s sold out within three hours, with proceeds directed towards farming resilience in Palestine.
The project explored preservation not simply as a means of storing resources, but as a practice of sustaining relationships between community, place and living systems. Through shared labour, land care and the exchange of knowledge, the olive became both material and method: a way of reconnecting with a crop that has shaped diaspora, while considering how food can hold memory across changing landscapes.
The 120 unique labels, designed and drawn by architect and educator Bella Singal, each represent a segment of a wider map of Naarm from which the olives were harvested. Together, the labels form a fragmented portrait of the city and its overlooked abundance.
Olive Oil for Palestine asks how acts of harvesting, preservation and sharing can create connections across distance, migration and time—and how everyday food practices might cultivate more reciprocal relationships with land.
2026
Olive Oil for Palestine is a community-led olive preservation project tracing a journey from mapping overlooked urban olive trees in Naarm (Melbourne) through harvesting, pressing and bottling, to replanting.
Olive trees are an abundant yet largely unnoticed crop across Naarm, carrying traces of migration, settlement and cultural change. Countless stories of migration have brought olive trees to these lands, creating a living archive of cultural memory, care and belonging.
During the 2026 harvest, Playte worked with local communities to map and harvest urban olive trees, collecting 480kg of olives across Naarm. The harvest was pressed at Long Road Olive Grove into 120 individually labelled bottles of olive oil. The bottle’s sold out within three hours, with proceeds directed towards farming resilience in Palestine.
The project explored preservation not simply as a means of storing resources, but as a practice of sustaining relationships between community, place and living systems. Through shared labour, land care and the exchange of knowledge, the olive became both material and method: a way of reconnecting with a crop that has shaped diaspora, while considering how food can hold memory across changing landscapes.
The 120 unique labels, designed and drawn by architect and educator Bella Singal, each represent a segment of a wider map of Naarm from which the olives were harvested. Together, the labels form a fragmented portrait of the city and its overlooked abundance.
Olive Oil for Palestine asks how acts of harvesting, preservation and sharing can create connections across distance, migration and time—and how everyday food practices might cultivate more reciprocal relationships with land.
