Politics of the Underground

MA City Design 2021/2022
Politics of the Underground
Archaeological Site as a Case of Urban Struggle

Archaeological sites in Palestine are never frozen in time, they are living and breathing urban spaces. As public space is impossible to carve within the West Bank given the zoning laws imposed by the Israeli occupation, archaeological sites provide rare pockets of breathing room for children to play football, for teenagers to walk through tree groves in privacy, and for families to open popup souvenir shops for tourists visiting the sites.

Unfortunately these sites have been settler-colonial battlegrounds for a century, weaponised to dominate land by controlling its historical narrative. Hundreds of archaeological sites within Palestine were excavated and looted repeatedly, where imperial and settler voices and biblical narratives were then superimposed onto the ground, simplifying complexities and flattening out subterranean entanglements. In so doing, the process of colonial excavation - which exploited Palestinian labour including women and children - rendered Palestinian presence obsolete. Today, the settler-colonial Israeli state continues to weaponise archaeology as a tool for nation-building and expansion by attaching each site to a Zionist and biblical narrative.

By highlighting those spaces as living and breathing landscapes today and questioning the value systems and assumed linear time embedded in the classics and archaeological discourse, the MA City Design studio embraces a delinear state to contest the prevalent instrumentalisation of archaeological sites and shed light on how they are weaponized to expand the Israeli occupation. The apartheid state legitimises the dispossession of Palestinians from their homes and businesses near and in the archaeological sites in Sebastia, Hebron, Silwan, Al Jib, and many others. Settlements are strategically built near and around biblically significant sites as a chess move towards further land grabs and control of the physical terrain. Settlers terrorise the ecological landscape by setting fire to Palestinian agricultural fields surrounding the monuments, cutting down trees, and leaking toxic waste in the valleys.

The studio begins with Sebastia, a village northwest of the city of Nablus in the West Bank. This is the first case study in what will be a series of focused enquiries that will aim to do two things: restitch the fragmented archives of each site by building a living archive where historical and contemporary data is consolidated into a single open source space that can be used by the public, and two, create interventions that aim to undo models of the apartheid state. Both outputs centre Palestinian voices.

The studio will follow challenging lines of flight that explore different scales and forms of urban struggle including the right to public and private space, ecological terrorism, religious tourism, oral history, excavation labour, militarised archaeology, cultural heritage, displacement, and restitution. Through each lens the students will work towards collective knowledge building and embrace a collective mode of operating while engaging with the Palestinian residents, activists, NGOs, archaeologists, sound artists, archivists, through physical and virtual platforms. In the final term, the students will embark on their Independent Research Project taking off from the same lines of flight but through their individual and independent methods and interests. Future editions of the studio will look at other archaeological sites in Palestine with the hope of growing the living archive and forms of intervention over the years with each case study.

—Dima Srouji

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