On 20/3/2025, I led a session as part of the international talk series Material Interests, entitled ‘Land Pedagogies: Material Practices of Repair and Return’ with artist Areej Ashhab (born 1995). The Palestinian artist explored how more-than-human materials and earth-based practices act as catalysts for repair and return in Palestine. Areej is an epitome of arts and cultural leadership as a young, exciting, trans-disciplinary change-maker. The session demonstrated her incredible generosity as a community organiser through her powerful and poetic portfolio. Her website and social media platforms provides a strong picture of your work – but engaging with her live, even through a screen, was infinitely even more inspiring, as seen in the range of questions and reflections. I was supported by Dr Tsvetelina Hristova.

ABOUT AREEJ ASHHAB
  • 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. 
ABOUT THE TALK
  • 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. 
  • Drawing on her work with the collectives Al-Wah’at and Al-Block, and her collaboration with artist Raghad Saqfalhait, Areej Ashhab examined 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 MATERIAL INTERESTS

Above: Screenshot from WSARotunda