Description
My paper explores how urban ruins and ruination in violent settler-colonial settings formulate spatial articulations of colonial memories. I will examine Palestine/Israel’s contested urban landscape as a palimpsest of ongoing struggle, where layers of material debris, memories and fantasies are intertwined, from ancient archaeological remains to recently demolished homes. More specifically, I will analyse the spatial articulation of urban memory as scars of warfare, representing traces of violence, repression and neglect and as living tissues in which people dwell, live and act. By taking the material, sensual, and more-than-representational features of the ruins into account, I will argue that spatialised memory of political violence, colonial ruination, and potential recovery render Palestine/Israel’s urban environment in a permanent state of geopolitical atrophy between violence and resilience, destruction and construction.
