You’ve been invited to: 

Material Interests – Land Pedagogies: Material Practices of Repair and Return

Venue:  Online via Teams
Speakers: Areej Ashhab, with Kai Syng Tan and Tsvetelina Hristova  

Introduced forests of Aleppo pine cover the hills of Palestine, among which shiny pads of prickly pear cactus emerge in rows redrawing the boundaries of destroyed villages. Scattered across these landscapes, lime pits—once active sites of production—are now filled with rubble, while construction sites pile up various earth types once kneaded and shaped into everyday objects. While these sites might fade into the background as one walks past them, they hold the histories of lost practices and bear the marks of slow violence inflicted by decades of settler colonialism. 

In this talk, Areej Ashhab will explore how more-than-human materials and earth-based practices act as catalysts for repair and return in Palestine. 

Drawing on her work with the collectives Al-Wah’at and Al-Block, and her collaboration with artist Raghad Saqfalhait, she will examine how walking, community workshops, and material experimentation become tools for engaging with land-based knowledge and resistance.

Through her research, she will address the layered relationships between land, heritage and power, challenging colonial practices that weaponise ecology as a tool of dispossession and land domination, while moving beyond the notion of nature as a passive, separate other. 

About Areej Ashbab

Areej Ashhab is a Palestinian research artist with a background in architecture. 

Her practice focuses on community practices and material ecologies, with the land at the centre of her work. She is the co-founder of Al-Block collective, documenting lost narratives of the Palestinian landscape through collective walking, and Al-Wah’at, a translocal collective countering anthropocentric and colonial narratives around arid lands and futures. 

Areej has taught at institutions such as the Royal College of Art, London, and the Arab American University, Ramallah. She holds a masters degree from the Centre for Research Architecture (2022). Currently, she is participating in the 2025 Jan van Eyck Academie Residency as part of Al-Wah’at collective. 

Material Interests Lecture Series
Hear from leading artists and other world-changing practitioners across the fine arts and related industries in this flagship speaker series organised by the Department of Art and Media Technology and co-sponsored by Southampton Institute for Arts and Humanities.

Thu, 20 Mar 2025 17:00 – 18:00 (UTC+00:00) Dublin, Edinburgh, Lisbon, London

We look forward to having you attend the event!

Teams Event Link

Join the meeting now
Meeting ID: 320 390 672 966
Passcode: kD3gw3hs