Maternal Exhumations

Public Programme #5 : Dima Srouji

Dima Srouji is an architect and visual artist exploring the ground as a deep space of rich cultural weight. She works with glass, text, archives, maps, plaster casts, and film, understanding each as an evocative object and emotional companion that help her question what cultural heritage and public space mean in the context of the Middle East. Dima is currently the Jameel Fellow at the Victoria & Albert Museum and leading the MA City Design studio at the Royal College of Art in London. 

Maternal Exhumations explores the ways in which settler colonialism deployed archaeology through the exploitative labour of Palestinian women and children. They were used to excavate artefacts to prove the bible through scientific methods, only in reality they compressed the complex narrative of the Palestinian ground. In so doing, the symptoms of colonial excavation remain embedded in our memories within the ground as well as within ourselves. Intergenerational trauma is unfolded through the talk by examining the aftermath of the excavations through the case study of Sebastia, a small village in the West Bank, and by teasing out the overwhelming presence of the female body in the subterranean space.

Beverley Butler (UCL Institute of Archaeology) will be convening the discussion and there will be a screening of a short extract from Dima’s film during the event. 

The event is open to all but please register via the link above.

The Archaeology-Heritage-Art Research Network examines the varied ways in which archaeology, heritage and art converge across a broad range of concepts and practices, from artistic interventions in the museum space to archaeological interpretations which deploy and take inspiration from contemporary art.

The AHA 2022 PROGRAMME: INTERDISCIPLINARY METHODOLOGIES is supported with a grant from the Centre for Critical Heritage Studies.