Occupied Botanics
Histories Carried in Soil? — brings together eighteen found cards bearing pressed Palestinian wildflowers, unearthed in Ferrol on the Atlantic coast and re-situated as a micro-intervention embedded in earth. What once circulated as sentimental “Souvenirs of the Holy Land” now reappear as material witnesses to political histories that extend from Ottoman Palestine to the post-1948 rebranding of place, and into the present moment in which Gaza’s infrastructures, ecologies, and lives are being systematically destroyed — a destruction that must be named as genocide.
By placing these cards in soil, the work withdraws them from the innocence of nostalgia. Instead, they reveal how botanical objects participate in and record the longue durée of displacement, erasure, and environmental devastation. The pressed flowers — seemingly fragile, decorative, apolitical — expose how even flora is drawn into global regimes of appropriation, circulation, and symbolic overwriting. Their journey from Palestine to a forgotten box in Galicia indexes not only material dislocation but also the instability of cultural memory under conditions of ongoing colonial occupation.
Here, the earth does not function as a neutral support but as a charged archive. Soil becomes a medium that absorbs and transmits evidence of violence: the uprooting of people, the destruction of ecosystems, the attempts to extinguish both cultural and biological continuity. The installation asks what it means for nonhuman matter to bear witness — and how such witnessing unsettles our assumptions about who or what can speak to history.
The work demands that we attend to the silences and residues left behind by ongoing occupation. It calls for a rethinking of how we engage with fragile objects, with landscapes under siege, and with the forms of witnessing that persist in spite of — and against — attempts at erasure.
