Curating the future of Palestine

With the urgent risk of loss and expropriation of cultural heritage in the West Bank, Silvia Hassouna undertook a four month research project in the Palestinian towns of Ramallah and Bethlehem to study innovative approaches being adopted by museums to preserve Palestinian life in a context of cultural erasure. We caught up with Silvia to find out more about her research.

What is the background to your fieldwork? What drew you to the project?

My fieldwork is part of my PhD research project on emerging cultural movements in the West Bank. I examine the work of contemporary museums in the Occupied Territories in order to revisit conceptions of 'land' and national identity in Israel-Palestine. I am particularly influenced by postcolonial geographies that have been attentive to the ways that social groups in the Global South creatively represent their place and identity for internal and external audiences. In contrast to narratives that are exclusively focused on Palestinian violence and geopolitics, I wanted to unveil alternative political imaginaries that come from Palestinian cultural practitioners and are often overlooked.

What questions did you set out to answer? What did you find out?

During my fieldwork I was volunteering at the Palestine Museum of Natural History (PMNH) in Bethlehem, an institution that works in nature conservation, education and endangered animals’ rehabilitation. My broad questions were the following:

• What is the contemporary relationship between ecology and Palestinian cultural identity?

• What notions of nature and ecology lie at the core of the PMNH’s vision and how do they feed into emerging political narratives and possible futures?

• How does the PMNH work in practice and what are the main struggles it faces?

My main finding is that different ideas of nature and land are used to create new national imaginaries that are not exclusively focused on human politics, but include endangered animals and ecosystems.