It’s just before noon on a sun-drenched farm in southern Tunisia, and Faouzi Khlifi is coughing. A lot. But instead of attempting to stifle the sound or soothe his throat, the 44-year-old Tunisian contemporary artist—known professionally as eL Seed—is simply welcoming it all in. “Coughing is a good sign,” he tells me with a smile once he’s caught his breath. “It means the olive oil is extra fresh.”
As an artist, eL Seed is mostly known for his large-scale murals, paintings, and sculptures that feature Arabic calligraphy and explore themes of unity and belonging. Born in Paris to Tunisian parents, he became a TED Fellow in 2015 for his work using art to bridge divides, and his pieces have been shown everywhere from The Met to The Louvre Abu Dhabi, including a collaboration with Louis Vuitton. But in 2018, he began producing olive oil on his family’s farm in Gabès, a coastal oasis city about five hours south of Tunis, Tunisia’s capital.
This wasn’t ever part of his life plan, but after stumbling upon an olive grove with trees that had been planted by his great-grandfather, he took it as a sign and bought the land on the spot—then ended up going all in (a common theme in his life, as you’ll soon learn). He became certified as an olive oil sommelier in 2023, and eventually launched his own premium olive oil brand, Tacapae—rooted in the Berber word “Takabbast,” meaning fortified place—in 2024.
Granted, venturing into the world of olive oil may sound like an unexpected left turn for a globally recognized artist. Yet spend some time with eL Seed, as I did back in late October for his weeklong olive oil harvest celebration on the Gabès farm, and you’ll quickly understand that turning his attention to Tunisia’s “liquid gold” was not as much of a hard career pivot as it may seem. One year after Tacapae’s launch, he’s come to see his artisanal olive oil as an extension of his art itself. For one thing, the ceramic bottles are collectibles in their own right, with commissioned designs from a rotating cast of contemporary artists.
But on an even deeper level, he’s using them to create cultural change, much like he does with the rest of his work. “Part of my goal with the oil is to help my people reclaim our Tunisian heritage…reclaim our pride,” he told me over a typical breakfast of olive oil, honey, and mlewi (flatbread) one morning. “The Orientalist way of perceiving the Arab world, of perceiving North Africa, can be very folkloric. But now we’re saying: See this from our perspective. We’re taking back our stories. Taking back our traditions. And we’re trying to change the way people think.”
Tunisians have been producing olive oil for more than 3,000 years. While wild olive trees grew in North Africa long before that and were used by the Indigenous Berber communities, the Phoenicians (founders of ancient Carthage) introduced organized olive cultivation to the region sometime between the 12th and 8th centuries BCE. Much later, under French rule in the late 1800s and in the decades of independence that followed, olive tree cultivation expanded even more—a tradition sustained largely by women, historically the family breadwinners. As a result, around 80% of families in Tunisia today are connected to an olive oil heritage in some way. “Olive oil is deeply woven into our culture,” Dhouha Mizouni Chtourou told me at the harvest party. She is Tunisia’s leading international olive oil expert, lovingly referred to by locals as the “Queen of Olive Oil.” “Eating with olive oil, cooking with olive oil, planting olive trees…this is who we are. It is not new.”
But outside Tunisia, that story is rarely told. Westerners tend to associate olive oil with Italy. And Greece. And Spain. “Many don’t realize that although Tunisia is in Africa, we are also a Mediterranean country—and we produce olive oil, too,” Dhouha continued. Perhaps even more surprising, they may not realize the oil they’re consuming may in fact be Tunisian… simply repackaged under European labels. “A lot of the olive oil in Italy actually comes from Tunisia, but people don’t know that—and that’s the issue,” eL Seed told me.
Part of this knowledge gap can be traced to Tunisia’s recent export history. Up until 1995, the government held a monopoly on olive oil exports and sold nearly all of the oil in bulk, namely to Italian and Spanish brokers who then bottled it under their own labels. “But I don’t want to criticize my brothers from Italy, because something really bad happened in their country that created this situation,” eL Seed told me one morning. “A Mediterranean fly killed so many olive trees that they had to burn them, and to respond to demand, they had to import. Then they marketed their bottles so well that people assumed the olive oil inside was all Italian.” Tunisia, meanwhile, wasn’t doing any marketing at all. So while Italy, Spain, and Greece spent the 20th century introducing their bottled olive oil to the masses around the world—helped along by increased global interest in the olive oil-reliant Mediterranean Diet—Tunisia’s remained largely invisible.
All that began to shift in 1995, when the government monopoly finally ended, and private companies were allowed to export. But it wasn’t until 2006, when Tunisia launched its first national strategy to promote Tunisian olive oil, that things really started to change. Bottled exports were just 500 metric tons that year; today, they’re closer to 40,000. And now, Tunisia is the second-largest producer of olive oil in the world, with output estimated at 500,000 metric tons this year alone (Spain is number one, coming in at more than one million metric tons). On top of that, Tunisia is also the biggest producer of organic olive oil worldwide, with 227,000 hectares (about 561,000 acres) certified organic by the USDA. And because the country doesn’t allow olive oil imports, everything produced there—including oils from other independent brands like KAÏA and Olivko—is single-origin by definition, too.
Even so, global recognition hasn’t quite caught up with the progress on the ground. “We still need people to know that Tunisia is a producer of olive oil. That’s the situation,” Dhouha said. If you ask eL Seed, that situation may also be rooted in something far deeper: a Eurocentric worldview. “The truth is, we’re also up against cultural imperialism,” he told me on a walk through the olive groves one morning. “People still want their products to be from Europe, not Africa.” Tacapae, then, is his attempt to shift that perception and to elevate Tunisia’s olive heritage. He’s a stickler for the rules of the harvest process—always bring your olives to the mill to press them the same day you pick them; never store oil in a transparent bottle because its worst enemy is sunlight—as he knows the stakes are high. The quality of the product shapes its greater image, after all.
“This is a bigger project than just olive oil,” he reflected. “It’s about showing that there are other ways. It’s about showing that everybody is important in this world.” And it’s not just the rest of the world he’s trying to convince. “Tacapae is more of a direct message to the community here than anyone else,” he continued. “The more I go through this, the more I realize my target isn’t people from the outside—it’s people from here. From Gabès. From the south of Tunisia. All the people who sometimes forget their own value. We tend to content ourselves, to accept the bare minimum…but the first thing I say to people is, that’s not enough. Good is not enough. Always remember your value.”
On the day of the main party event, a harvest lunch for 60 people, I awoke to sunny skies and a cheerful WhatsApp from eL Seed’s brother saying he’d pick me and our photographer Clémence up at around 3 p.m. (eL Seed may have started Tacapae, but I quickly learned it’s very much a family affair.) By the time we arrived, the earthy farm we’d spent the past few days hanging out on had transformed into a festive explosion of color. Guests were decked out in their finest—deep green velvet, soft linens, gold necklaces that caught the late-afternoon sun—and eL Seed and his team had scattered jewel-toned pillows and mats beneath the olive trees so people could lounge between courses. Chef Valentin Amine Raffali, a French-Moroccan chef eL Seed had hired for the occasion, cooked lunch in a traditional earth oven, and we ate a lavish feast on the grass with plates balanced on our laps. Allouche fel kolla (slow-cooked lamb stew), rigouta (smoked ricotta over olive branches), omek houria (puréed carrots with garlic and harissa), and more, including plenty of fresh olive oil. Everyone I talked to seemed to be involved in some sort of interesting creative project, though in a true testament to a good party, that was hardly the focus. Who wants to have the “what do you do” conversation when there is good food to eat and olive trees to lie under and toddlers to chase around grassy, golden fields?
But it was the final evening of the trip, a few days after the buzz of the main event had faded, that stayed with me most. eL Seed, Clémence, and I decided to go for one last golden hour walk through the olive groves to reflect on the time we’d just spent together. As the sun was beginning to dip, we took a seat under one of the older olive trees, and for a while we didn’t speak. Just stared out at the land. When I finally asked eL Seed what he was thinking about, he said he was remembering a line from the French writer Jean Cocteau: There is no such thing as love, only proof of love.
“Talking is good,” he said, “but I’d rather somebody show me that they love me. And that’s what I try to do with my land. People always say, ‘I love my land,’ and I say fine—but what do you do for it? It’s important to do things for the place that’s important to you. I’m so proud of being from here, and that’s why I do all of this. The harvest party, the oil, everything. It’s all for the place I love.”
