By Eleri Connick, British doctoral candidate at the University of Amsterdam in the School for Cultural Analysis.
In September 2024, with support from the CBRL Andrea Zerbini Award, I was able to facilitate two workshops which formed key parts of my doctoral research. In this blog, I would like to introduce one of the surprising but beautiful encounters that took place in one of the workshops, specifically how it is to encounter created witnesses.
The Material Witness
My doctoral project sits at the intersection of critical heritage, memory studies and conflict studies. My interest has been in exploring how objects within the domestic space convey notions of exile that transcend the home and present time; and can enable the creation (and securing) of an extended archive of Palestine and resistance to cultural destruction. In previous workshops for example, this has included a clay bowl brought from Gaza, a straw tray for collecting vegetables from Nablus, and travel documents issued to Jerusalemites who were told that they could return home after a week. The workshop participants and I focused on how these objects become more than just mementoes; they are survivors, witnesses, and carriers of stories. They are material witnesses of Palestinian exile.
The goal of the workshops was to bring Palestinians in exile in Amman together in collective spaces with their Material Witnesses. The impact of these workshops is multiple. Firstly, everyday objects centred in these workshops, can be transformative. They are displaced but now are held onto and cared for – these objects not only reveal a visceral connection to Palestine, but contribute to the oral history of Palestinian exile and form an important contemporary archive of Palestine. They are themselves markers of a ‘before’ that demonstrate the existence of Palestine as a place. These objects can be traced to villages even if the village has been demolished or renamed. Second, when these objects are brought together as an assemblage, they commemorate, mourn, and recognise Palestinians’ enduring exile in a way in that relinquishes grand narratives but showcases the multi-faceted and heterogenous nature of the Palestinian experience. On an individual level, there is space for self-determination and freedom from dominant collective stories. On the collective level, the workshops demonstrate the entanglement of Palestinian experiences of exile, despite their fragmentation. Therefore, it becomes a way to capture the complexity of belonging and alienation in exile.
The workshops have objects, referred to as Material Witnesses of exile, at their core. All activities that took place and all conversations that ensued had all begun from the Material Witnesses. Therefore, you can imagine my surprise when several of the participants to the Material Witness workshop, held in Tiraz Musueum, included “witnesses” that the participants had created themselves. I had become so used to participants bringing inherited objects.
Embroidered Material Witnesses
In the wake of the war on Gaza, the engagement with the practice of tatreez increased exponentially within Palestinian collectives across the world. In Amman, many more workshops were being offered for individuals to learn the practice of tatreez but also numerous restaurants and other outlets are now selling items such as shirts or bags with Palestinian embroidery adorning it. As I wandered the city, I found myself wanting to organise a workshop which would specifically look at Embroidered Material Witnesses. At their essence, objects created through the practice of tatreez are storytellers and witnesses innately. As Kristine Sheets (2025) describes:
“for centuries, Palestinian women employed tatreez as a form of communication, donning dresses, or thobes, adorned intricately with tatreez, to communicate with others about their lives, emotions and experiences. They embroidered what they observed daily, in the everyday contexts of the village and the family. With each pattern – its colour, stitchwork and thread – comes a story, one that changes alongside each artist’s personal experiences”.
Tiraz Museum felt like the perfect place for such a workshop to take place. It is the home to the largest collection of Palestinian thobes, and so, the Material Witnesses that participants brought to the workshop, would then be in conversation with other Palestinian embroidered objects.
Discarding Perceived Boundaries
Such qualitative and playful methodology – which I’ve discussed on the CBRL blog before– is always a space of surprise. I could never begin to imagine what stories the Material Witnesses would prompt, not only from its narrator, but also from the wider collective. But it was an unexpected surprise when several participants upon introducing their witness described how they themselves had made the witness. They shared, one after the other, that they were children and grandchildren of Palestinians who upon fleeing al-Nakba, had lost everything. There were no “material witnesses” from these houses.
No material witness had survived the journey of violent expulsion. And yet, through learning the practice of tatreez from their mothers, and from their grandmothers, and other Palestinian women around them, they had gained the skills to create their own Material Witness of exile. This important heritage practice of – tatreez – had offered affirmation that another world is possible. A world where, despite the Settler-Colonial desire for all aspects of Palestinian materiality to be eradicated, through tatreez they could create Material Witnesses which tell a story of life. Through tatreez, the participants had created Material Witnesses as examples of “artistic fugitivity that flee colonial captivity” (Karkabi and Ibraheem, 2020).
At a moment when we are witnessing such devastating loss, in Gaza and the West Bank, we need to ensure there is space to understand the creation of new Material Witnesses.
All Photography by Eleri Connick
Eleri Connick is a British doctoral candidate at the University of Amsterdam in the School for Cultural Analysis. She was the recipient of the CBRL Andrea Zerbini Award in 2023/2024; the PhD Fellow at Darat al Funun (Amman) February 2023 – July 2023 and a ZEIT-Stiftung Ebelin und Gerd Bucerius Beyond Borders Start-up scholar in 2022/23.
The views expressed by our authors on the CBRL blog are not necessarily endorsed by CBRL but are commended as contributing to public debate.
