In North Africa, olive oil has always been more than a pantry staple. It is memory, ritual, economy, and survival bottled into liquid gold. In Tunisia, it is also politics—bound up in land, heritage, and global systems of exploitation. It is against this backdrop that Moroccan-British artist Hassan Hajjaj has joined forces with Tacapae, the art and olive oil project founded by Franco-Tunisian street artist eL Seed, to release a limited-edition collection of bottles that carry as much cultural weight as they do flavor.
The collaboration came to life during the inaugural Tacapae Harvest in Gabès in October 2024, when artists, chefs, and thinkers were invited to experience the olive harvest firsthand. It wasn’t a sterile press junket; guests picked olives, witnessed the pressing process, and shared long communal meals under the desert sun. It was during this gathering that Hajjaj and eL Seed—longtime friends—decided to collaborate. The result is a trio of bottles, each produced in an edition of 300, that turn the most quotidian of kitchen staples into rarefied art objects.
For Hajjaj, who has built his career on turning the overlooked into the iconic, the project was an invitation to interpret Tunisia’s visual culture. The artist, born in Larache in 1961 and now working between Marrakech and London, has long been celebrated for his bold, pop-infused portraits that blend Moroccan motifs with global consumer iconography. His frames lined with Arabic-labelled soda cans, his portraits of friends in checkerboard hijabs and counterfeit designer gear, his irreverent staging of “high” and “low” culture—all of it amounts to an aesthetic that is at once joyful and subversive. For Tacapae, he drew inspiration from the Tunisian roadside: mile markers, hand-painted oil cans, kiosks painted in primary colors, the street signs you pass without a second glance.
The bottles— glossy ceramics, with a slightly tilted neck and the word “OIL” stamped in blocky retro typeface in the center—are not just vessels for olive oil, but sculptural objects that embody the rhythms of daily life in Tunisia, elevated into something collectible, desirable, and impossible to reproduce.
Tacapae itself was conceived as a way to give olive oil the reverence it deserves. eL Seed, whose monumental calligraffiti murals have stretched across cities from Cairo to Paris, has always worked at the intersection of tradition and modernity. With Tacapae, named after the ancient Roman designation for Gabès, he applies that ethos to agriculture. The brand commissions artists each year to design bottles that transform olive oil from a faceless commodity into a cultural artifact. By rooting the project in Gabès, on an organic olive grove, Tacapae collapses the space between land, community, and contemporary design. It turns the harvest into something closer to an artistic residency than an industrial supply chain.
That insistence on visibility is crucial in the current moment. Around the world, olive oil has become a crisis commodity. Droughts, wildfires, and climate change have devastated harvests in Spain, Italy, and Greece, driving prices to record highs and leaving supermarket shelves bare. Tunisia, meanwhile, remains one of the largest exporters of olive oil, yet most of its product is sold in bulk to European brands. Once it crosses the Mediterranean, it is mixed, diluted, and rebranded with “Made in Italy” or “Product of Spain” labels. Consumers in Paris or New York may drizzle Tunisian olive oil over their salads, but they’ll never know it came from Gabès or Sfax. The country’s contribution is erased, its identity scrubbed off in favor of Western prestige.
This imbalance is not new—it mirrors centuries of postcolonial resource extraction, in which the Global South supplies raw products while Europe and the West claim authorship, visibility, and value. But in a world where olive oil is suddenly framed as scarce and precious, the stakes feel even higher. By placing Tunisian olive oil in a bottle designed by one of North Africa’s most acclaimed artists, Tacapae makes a quiet but potent political statement.
The limited-edition bottles, meticulously numbered and never to be reproduced, carry with them both fragility and power. Fragility, because olive oil production itself is vulnerable to the whims of climate and politics; power, because they remind us that culture, like agriculture, cannot be divorced from its roots. Hajjaj’s reinterpretation of Tunisia’s roadside vernacular transforms the bottles into pop relics, while eL Seed’s vision ensures they remain grounded in the soil of Gabès.
What makes the collaboration particularly resonant is the way it reflects the parallel practices of its two protagonists. Both Hajjaj and eL Seed work in the liminal space between heritage and globalization, remixing Arab aesthetics for a world audience. Both are known for collapsing boundaries between art and life, for turning everyday objects—be it Arabic script on a crumbling wall or a can of Fanta—into carriers of cultural pride. Both believe in the power of joy, color, and playfulness as forms of resistance. Their bottles embody that ethos: at once celebratory and critical, deeply rooted in place but legible anywhere.
In the end, this is more than a design project. It is a story about visibility, authorship, and value. Who gets to define cultural aesthetics, who profits from the land, and who is erased in the process? By placing olive oil at the center of an artistic collaboration, Hajjaj and eL Seed have not only created a collectible object but also sparked a conversation about pride, heritage, and equity.
To pour oil from one of these bottles is to participate in that story. It is to acknowledge that what looks like a simple act of seasoning a salad is, in fact, bound up in histories of trade, erasure, resilience, and creativity. It is to taste Tunisia not as a hidden ingredient in a European export, but as a source, a place, and a culture in its own right. And it is to see, as both artists insist, that the ordinary—the roadside kiosk, the olive grove, the bottle on your kitchen counter—can always be extraordinary, if only you know how to look.
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