The Shahada of the Olive Tree: Post-Liberation Imaginaries of Wadi Fouqin and Beitar Illit
MA Architecture Thesis Project, RCA, 2024
The Shahada of the Olive Tree imagines a de-colonial Palestinian future, and meditates on the centrality of plant life in the remembrance of collective existence. Drawing from a rich tradition of Palestinian futurism, the project opens up a space for liberatory thinking by moving beyond a solutioneering framework stuck in the present and defined by the logic of the Occupation.
The site of the project is in an imagined near future, after a period of liberatory struggle, in which Palestinian refugees from across the diaspora have been granted the right of return. Sites of colonial erasure across the West Bank must be reckoned with. Beitar Illit, one of the largest settlements in the West Bank, towers over the village of Wadi Fouqin, depleting it of water and curtailing the movement of Palestinian agricultural workers. Re-imagining the site entails a careful balance between destruction, rehabilitation and subverting the initial violent purposes of the colonial blocks to alternative uses. The proposal makes tangible just one of many potential futures, whilst drawing from a well of traditional craft and communal life.
Ecology plays a central role in the narrative of return. The olive tree, is characterised as as bearing witness or shahada to all of the struggle, resilience, and community that has taken place before them in the centuries that they have been stood firmly in the land. The concept of Shahada, or bearing witness, extends to the natural world, embracing the idea that the land itself participates in remembrance. For humans, remembering what came before, in both the recent colonial past as well as the distant geological and ecological past, is simply a joining-in to the abundant chorus of plant life.
A number of locations around the site are situated along a route of procession celebrating the season of harvest, proposing movement through the terrain as a key methodology for re-integration with the ecology of the site. At each site, an intervention into the existing settlement architecture re-commons the buildings. The proposal fleshes out and makes tangible one of many potential futures, and is concerned with how it will feel to re-inhabit the land.
“Post-Liberation Imaginaries in Wadi Fouqin and Beitar Illit” offers one of many potential decolonial Palestinian futures, emphasising an integrated relationship between people and land. This work imagines a future where the scars of occupation are born witness to through ecological resurgence, communal ritual construction and destruction, and the re-membering of narratives left strewn across the landscape.
In envisioning a liberated Beitar Illit, the project proposes a series of interventions that repurpose colonial structures into spaces of communal life and agricultural production. This transformation begins with ‘ungrounding,’ a process that removes the fences and fortifications enforced by the settlement to allow the natural landscape to re-emerge. The proposal resists simply reversing colonization by creating new forms of segregation. Instead, it proposes porosity, connectivity, and integration with the ecological life of the hill, and a seasonal cycle which ties the liberated Beitar Illit with the town of Wadi Fouqin in the valley.
The communal rooftops, repurposed residential blocks, and watchtowers (Manatir) are reimagined as spaces of gathering, production, and celebration. Each intervention is tailored to the specific potentials of the block, promoting an architecture of particularities rather than universals, in contrast with the homogenous design of the colonial settlement. These spaces are envisioned not just as functional units but as loci of ritual and festivity, weaving the social and ecological threads of Palestinian life into a cohesive and vibrant tapestry.
The cyclical nature of agricultural and communal activities, highlighted by the proposed seasonal procession during the olive harvest, emphasises a return to a rhythm in tune with the land and plant life which witnesses. This procession, culminating in the watchtower at the hill’s crest, symbolises the reclaiming of the highest point of the once-oppressive settlement for communal and creative purposes. Here, the ruins of colonialism are transformed into beacons of hope and collective memory.
Through methodologies like cyanotype printing and digital tools like Unreal Engine, the project bridges the gap between the present and an imagined future, offering a tangible vision of what a decolonized Palestine could look like. These tools have allowed for an engagement with the site from a distance, creating a potential model for solidarity work for practitioners who are not physically present in the land, whilst recognising its limitations.
The hope for the project is that it can serve not as an ‘answer’ to colonial violence, but simply as giving life and colour to one of many potential worlds. In situating the project in a near future, the limitations and potentials of architecture are acknowledged: liberation will not be won through architectural intervention, but through struggle. The place of architecture is in the ‘post’-liberation: where new worlds will need to be built from the ruins of the old.
The Shahada of the Olive Tree Cyanotype prints, A5, using found olive tree matter and found matter.
