The Exhibition
Photos by Ismail Noor
Site
Sebastia
Installed
Sharjah Architecture Triennial
Team
Dima Srouji, Silvia Truini, Dirar Kalash, and Nadia Abu El Haj
Archaeological excavation as architectural violence.
“Archaeology is destruction.” wrote Sir Mortimer Wheeler, one of the most influential British archaeologists of the first half of the 20th century. Archaeological excavation proceeds from the surface downwards, progressively removing layers of earth. Since the 1960s, archaeologists began to value the dirt itself, analysing the texture, orientation, and inclusions into layers to understand the processes that led to their deposit. This attention notwithstanding, each layer needs to be destroyed by removal before the next one can be accessed. At times, even ancient structures or their remains can be removed in the course of excavations, sacrificed to proceed with archaeological work.
When Sebastia was excavated, archaeology was not focused on strata and processes, but on the “discovery” of monument and artefacts instead. Earth and its strata was considered merely a sheath that needed removing to access the monuments lying underneath. In every excavation, the original context of layered earth is forever destroyed; in these early works, even more carelessly so. The earth excavated, disheveled and mixed, deprived of artefacts deemed relevant, was later used to partially re-fill the trenches. The landscape of Palestinian Tell Sebastia, with its olive orchards, was forever altered, punctuated by the monuments that the archaeologists deemed relevant and left exposed.
The main excavation method used was that of digging narrow and deep trenches, arbitrarily orienting the strips on the surface. The arbitrariness of excavation persisted also in the method that Kenyon elaborated two decades after the Sebastia campaign, that substituted the trenches with a squared grid.
In the experiential tour of Depth Unknown, Sebastia, excavation and its violence, as well as the museological display of displaced artefacts, is exposed and subverted. As a form of restitution of the context destroyed in excavations, each monument is represented through the inversion of its volumetric spaces. The positive space of the outstanding structures is carved as a hollow space. Each monument cannot be accessed fully from one space of the grid, as it traverses them unevenly and arbitrarily.
Learn more:
The monuments of the depth unknown
The Echoes
The Diaspora of Objects,
the Echoes of their absence
The gridded spaces represent the museum vitrines in which part of the objects taken in the excavations are displayed. None of these vitrines, nor the warehouses in which the majority of the Sebastian artefacts are stored, are in Sebastia or in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
Archaeologies practiced by Imperial and Colonial powers had a specific interest in monuments and ancient objects. Artefacts deemed of outstanding historical value were systematically removed from their geographical context, to the countries that funded the expeditions. Monuments are more difficult to remove, but this did not entirely prevent the looting of entire structures, like the obelisk of Axum stolen by the Italian Army in 1937 and returned to Ethyopia in 2005, or the Market Gate of Myletus and the Pergamon Altar in the Pergamon Museum of Berlin, to name a few. In both cases, the pretext for removal was to enhance conservation, to “save” the pieces from destruction, and allow for their study and their public display to Western audiences.
In the case of the artefacts from Sebastia , they are scattered between the United States, the United Kingdom, and Israel. Part of a group of ivory carvings dated to the IX and VIII century B.C.E. were originally stored in the Palestine Archaeological Museum (PAM) located in East Jerusalem. The PAM was originally an Imperial museum, built between 1930 and 1938 thanks to the donation of American philantropist J.D. Rockefeller, planned and administered by the British Mandate Authorities. After East Jerusalem was occupied by Israel during the Six-Day War of 1967, the museum was renamed after the funder, and fell under the joint administration of the Israel Museum and the Israel Department of Antiquities and Museums (later renamed Israel Antiquities Authority). This unilateral, joint administration is the reason behind the illegal transfer of antiquities, including the Sebastia Ivories, from the Rockefeller Museum in Occupied East Jerusalem, to the Israel Museum in West Jerusalem.
The imperial-colonial practice of extracting archaeological material and architectural fragments from their original context for study and conservation purposes is still underway in Occupied Palestine. Due to the arrangement of the Oslo Accords of 1993, 61% of the Occupied West Bank is under the complete control of Israel. There, archaeological activity is regulated and performed by the personnel of the Staff Officer for Archaeology, a dedicated department of the Israel Civil (formerly: Military) Administration of the Occupied West Bank. This institution is infamous for its lack of transparency, acting as a trojan horse for the establishment of settlement outposts, and for storing all the archaeological material in warehouses through which they leak from the Occupied West Bank to Israel.
Under the foot of Western violence, the objects that populate the underground of Palestine are, like a huge number of its people, in a forced diaspora, leaving behind a hollow form in their original context.
In the experiential tour of the Depth Unknown of Sebastia, each museum vitrine that contains a part of the reversed monument is haunted by a specific sound: the echoes and sounds of Sebastia’s hollowed underground, calling for itself and its dispersed fragments.