Living Thought Conversations
Areej Ashhab: On Material Losses and Returns
Friday, 28 November 2025, 6-8 pm
Rezidența9, Ion Luca Caragiale 32, Bucharest
The program Cultivators of Life, organized by tranzit.ro/Bucharest, opens the series of conversations in Living Thought, presenting the artist and researcher Areej Ashhab (Palestine/Netherlands).
The conversations in Living Thought aim to introduce contemporary scholars and artists who are working in the emerging field of knowledge and practices relating to land, to indigenous/ancestral knowledges and eco-social realities, and who are proposing not only reviews of problems, but visionary alternative paths. Continuing of the ongoing work of the Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life, the intellectual conversations in Living Thought are tools of conviviality aiming to spark the radical imagination needed to change our relations to culture, to re-orient our sense of the world, and to regain an ethical life outside the ongoing war on life.
Areej Ashhab: On Material Losses and Returns
Across Palestine’s hills and valleys, plants, soil and stone hold memory both materially and intergenerationally: the prickly-pear hedges that redraw erased village boundaries, remnants of lime pits that once held fires for transforming stone into plaster, or the scattered earths of construction sites once kneaded and shaped into everyday objects. While these materials might fade into the background, they carry the imprints of loss as well as the capacities for return.
In this talk, Areej Ashhab reflects on how her work with land-based collectives and material practices cultivates ecologies of continuity—ways of working that persist through interruption, transmit knowledge across generations, and reorient our relation to place. Moving through walking-based research, arboreal histories, and recent inquiries into material archiving, she traces how engagement with the land can activate submerged histories, build communal infrastructures of care, and imagine futures in the midst of escalating settler colonial violence and dispossession.
The talk will be followed by a conversation with Ovidiu Ţichindeleanu.
Areej Ashhab is an artist and researcher working between Palestine and the Netherlands. Her practice focuses on material heritage loss, more-than-human ecologies, and land politics through situated and embodied approaches. She co-founded Al-Block, which explores erased Palestinian landscapes through walking, and Al-Wah’at, a translocal collective challenging colonial imaginaries of arid lands. Her work spans material experimentation, film, and writing, and often unfolds collectively through workshops, walks, and shared meals. She holds an MA in Research Architecture and is a 2025 Jan van Eyck resident with Al-Wah’at.
The event is part of the program Cultivators of Life, a multianual project organized by tranzit.ro/Bucharest Association and co-financed by The Administration of the National Cultural Fund. The program continues and supports the activities started in 2021 at the Experimental Research Station for Research on Art and Life in Siliștea Snagovului, focused on conserving biodiversity, testing ecological prototypes, and rethinking the relationship between soils, materials and artistic production. Curated by Adelina Luft, the program proposes the study and formulation of a new lexicon and practices related to an emerging relationship between indigenous/ancestral knowledge, land cultivation and natural sciences, realized through a series of artistic residencies, open events in gardens around Bucharest, applied workshops, conferences with indigenous thinkers and a final group in 2026 at MODEM – Center for Modern and Contemporary Art in Debrecen.
The program does not necessarily represent the official position of the Administration of the National Cultural Fund. AFCN shall not be held liable for the program's content or any use to which the program outcome might be put. These are the sole responsibility of the beneficiary of the funding.
