Unsettled Earth

Unsettled Earth is a cross-disciplinary project that unfolds through an exhibition at Spore, as well as a study program and transnational partnerships with community organizations. Rooted in collaborations with grassroots agrarian initiatives and collectives in Palestine the project and exhibition ask:
⬤ How does the centrality of land persist in the present?
⬤ How is the environment mobilized as an apparatus of violence
and elimination?
⬤ And how might cultural institutions align with movements that
refuse the fragmentation of life, land, and history?
And other questions.

The dynamic, multichapter exhibition gathers installations, films, drawings, photographs, and sculptures and houses an evolving library of texts, publications, and audiovisual material, offering not only documentation but also tools for recovering land, preserving collective memory, and building political imaginaries of autonomy, interdependence, and self-determination. Jumana Manna’s sculptures invoke the history of peasantry and its politics through forms inspired by traditional systems of agricultural production and seed preservation. Rana Nazzal Hamadeh’s short film explores the intertwined histories of native plants and colonized peoples, weaving stories of sumac across two occupied lands, Turtle Island and Palestine, through the voices of women who call them home. Ahmad Alaqra draws the cycles of life and death of wild thistle plants that cover the hills of central Palestine from early spring to late summer. Kamal Aljafari’s 2024 film, UNDR depicts Palestinian land as a contested space where dynamite reshapes terrain, farmers toil, children play, and surveillance looms, echoing the region’s ongoing subjection to control from above. Bayan Abu Nahla’s watercolor drawing traces the ways in which the lands,
seas, and shores are turned into landscapes of violence through engineered scarcity and mechanisms of starvation. And more.