Al-Wah’at Collective: growing new artistic and research practices in arid ecologies from Palestine to Mexico

Regardless of their harsh climate, arid ecosystems being accused of “barrenness” is never innocent.  

Since its inception in 1948, one of Israel’s first attempts to erase Palestine and its history was by planting pine forests across its land. This effort, led by the Jewish National Fund, was implemented to both hide the ruins of over 500 depopulated villages and create an image of a green Holy Land – another colonial attempt to make the desert bloom through occupation. 

Yet the prickly pear cactus, deeply rooted in the land, persisted through these attempts of erasure and kept growing, showing traces of where ethnically cleansed villages used to breathe. Colloquially known as sabr (صبر) – the Arabic word for patience – this plant has been used for fencing orchards and cooking, especially in a time of imposed famine and genocide. 

Sabr, a symbol of resilience in Palestine, has a history of resistance in Mexico as well. Its symbiotic relationship with the cochineal, an insect highly prized for its production of red dye, gave the people of Oaxaca sovereignty over their land during the Spanish occupation. The exporting and introduction of the cochineal to the Mediterranean, mainly through greedy attempts of capital accumulation, has had a dire impact on sabr in Palestine and other neighbouring countries – one that might cause its extinction. 

Al-Wah’at Collective, a research and art collective, is dedicated to countering harmful assumptions of arid lands. Their projects investigate and archive different practices of looking at these multispecies alliances, like the one forming between the prickly pear cactus and cochineal. The collective looks specifically at how they stem to counter dominant colonial logic, while simultaneously shifting depending on their unique context. 

The three founders of Al-Wah’at Collective, Areej Ashhab, Ailo Ribas, and Gabriella Demczuk, talk to Dazed MENA about what inspired them to ask these questions and how they centre Indigenous knowledge about these species to innovate new and accessible educational methods and initiatives.

Dazed MENA: Can you recount when each one of you personally reckoned with the political reality of an “arid” ecosystem? 

Areej Ashhab (AA): This question is what brought us together. We were all studying at Goldsmiths, University of London, for our master’s degree in 2022. Each one of us was looking at it in different contexts. In my case, I was looking at how the JNF forests were used to conceal the remains of Palestinian villages, which was based on the idea of making the desert bloom and filling the emptiness of a land waiting for people to redeem it.

Gabriella Demczuk (GD): I was conducting my project on biological patents, and I was really struck by one patent out of the University of Nevada, Reno, that was re-engineering the photosynthesis of a temperate plant to work in arid conditions – they were turning the crop into a desert plant in order to conserve water. This led me down this long rabbit hole of looking into how organisms are owned but also abstracted in order to create a property structure around them using paperwork, language, and visuals. 

Ailo Ribas (AR): I was doing a lot of work at a community garden in London, specifically around weeds and demystifying and de-villainising the kind of language that is used around them. This language is positioned very purposefully to justify things like redevelopment, used to justify settler colonialism on lands that were “barren” and “empty” to make them profitable. 

What are the parallels between these geographies, and how are they handled with specificity? 

AA: We’re mainly exploring patience as resistance and how the patience of local communities, whether in Palestine or Mexico, has a direct relation with the cactus and the ecosystem around it. Palestinians learned through cultivating it that it is quite resilient to harsh environments. This is how it evolved into a symbol of resilience against hardships for Palestinians in the face of settler colonialism. In parallel, the patience of the people in Mexico to cultivate the cochineal has preserved their lands from the Spanish invasion. We’re thinking about patience and how it’s a source of resistance for indigenous communities. 

How do you integrate each of your unique practices in Al-Wah’at? 

AR: The centre of the Venn diagram of the three of us was this notion of aridity, especially when weaponised by Western or colonial powers to justify the occupation and erasure of “wasteful” and “barren” lands. We each come from different backgrounds. My background is in writing. Areej’s background is in architecture. Gabriellea’s background is in photojournalism. While quite different, yet similar, our work together feels effortless. 

AA: We’re working in different contexts as well because we live in different places. I’m based in Palestine, Ailo is in Spain, and Gabriella is in the UK.

Can you talk about the different practices you have explored so far and what inspired them? 

AA: It’s very much led by what the ecology itself or community are telling us to do. We focus on four practices. Weaving and building with the cactus fibres, printing and dying with the cochineal, cooking recipes with the entirety of the cactus, and planting and pruning the cactus to take care of it. 

How do you involve indigenous communities and their modes of knowledge in your collective? 

GD: This project started during a residency at Sakiya in Ein Qiniya, Palestine. We were with the community for six weeks. We were all pretty new to this plant and this issue. It was during our time there that we spoke with farmers, artists, and artisans who were using the cactus and trying to understand it better. We led different workshops, wherein we gathered and dried the fibres and collected the cochineal. We collected healthy sabr pads from different locations in Palestine and then planted them around the border at Sakiya in the hopes that this would become a hedge in the future, protecting the site from settler invasions. It was also a living memorial to the villages that have been destroyed or depopulated.

AR: I would say that’s at the centre of what we’re trying to do, and I think one of our biggest priorities is to not be academic in our methods and outputs – workshops, publications, exhibitions, etc. – and instead to draw from local knowledge and wisdom, and also respond to local concerns. 

How do you envision this collective growing in the future? 

AA: We’ll be focusing on tangible outputs that can help us reach and connect more people working on this subject matter, especially in different contexts of resistance around the globe. We’re specifically hoping to highlight more symbiotic ways of relating to more-than-human beings.Humans are part of nature, but we’re not separated from the rest of it. 

GD: We also want to emphasise in our outputs, especially workshops, that we also need to be giving back. We need to be creating these spaces in which we can all learn together. We’re not there to teach people, but we’re all working and learning together.

AR: We also aim to explore knowledge and practices around the cochineal and the cactus in other parts of the world. We don’t want to be extracting these ideas for academic or conceptual outputs, but we’d rather make them widely accessible to the public.