By Sandervan Wettum, 2026
A patch of lime-plastered floor appears suspended between display and burial. In dialogue with a 1991 ritual at W139, where artists buried valued objects to “charge” the ground before installing a new floor, this work engages ancient burial practices in Palestine and the aftermath of their settler-colonial excavation.
Up until the 1970s, Palestinians produced lime to coat walls, floors, and ritual objects—burning limestone, mixing it with water into a paste, and allowing it to slowly harden back into stone. Used for millennia, lime was central to Neolithic burials (7000-6000BCE); its elemental cycle mediating between material and spirit, rock and flesh, death and renewal. Beneath domestic lime floors, ancestors were laid to rest—sometimes with lime-plastered skulls—anchoring lineage in the ground while making space for new life above.
Today, such buried ancient rituals are “unearthed” in Israeli salvage excavations (rapid digs preceding new construction). These excavations select what to clear away and what to inscribe into the ground. On the lands of Qaloniya—a Palestinian village destroyed and ethnically cleansed in the 1948 Nakba—excavations exposed village remains, a vast Neolithic settlement, and an Iron Age temple. The Neolithic and other pre-Nakba layers were removed to make way for a new road, while the Iron Age layer, privileged within biblical archaeology, was left undisturbed by the Israeli planners. To facilitate this process, the planned road was raised onto a bridge. Ancient stone and modern concrete thus participate in the same act of overwriting, reinforcing a narrative of Israel as embodying both modernity and exclusive ancestral roots. Layers that do not align with this narrative are treated as ruins. Once displaced into official archives or destroyed for redevelopment, they face a “second burial”—one that forecloses continuity or return.
In W139’s charged ground—where objects remain buried—an “unfleshed” lime skin, once domestic and sacred, hovers over the rubble and abandoned trenches of ongoing settler-colonial digging. It asks: what might the ground unleash when it is denied keeping what it holds?
By Sandervan Wettum, 2026
By Sandervan Wettum, 2026
By Sandervan Wettum, 2026
By Sandervan Wettum, 2026