aleppo pines In other contexts where settler projects sought to empty land of its people and livelihoods, similar mimicry logics appear. In 1901, the Jewish National Fund was established to develop Jewish settlement in Ottoman Palestine. Part of their stewardship strategy sought to cultivate large-scale monocultures of Aleppo pines – 250 million trees planted over a century – moving away from the local agrarian knowledge of olive and fruit trees. They were chosen not only for their rapid growth and low maintenance in arid climates but because they ‘suited the European image of a proper forest’, emphasising Western stewardship as the rightful and necessary way to tend the land. 5 If one were to step into the groves, brush away the needles, and draw one’s hands across the soil, they would eventually snag on the jagged rubble of cut stone; the buried foundations of Palestinian villages. Mimicry of a northern forest offers relief, a plausible deniability of how and why that forest came to be. The visual field of continuous pine canopies obscures the public secret of a previous Palestine. New roots grow through stone rubble and compacted earth, drawing sustenance from soils dense with displaced histories — a Palestinian homeland firmly planted below the grounds that colonialism traverses.
Fazal Sheikh
31°50 , 27”N / 35°1 , 33”E Yalu – Al Ramla District, ca. 2015.
5 Liat Berdugo, ‘A Situation: A Tree in Palestine’, Places Journal , January 2020
Despite their shared materials and construction standards, socioculturally speaking, roads never cohere . 6
ground
asphalt Asphalt is a material surface of command: smooth, continuous, and neutral, it is the most commonly encountered materialisation of power. Its authority lies in how easily it seeps into everyday life, our neighbourhoods, ceremonies, across memories, and normalises such entry as progress. Although major interwar highways in Europe were built in cement, the postwar expansion of the automobile industry favoured asphalt. Its rapid installation and material composition responded well to the pressures of postwar reconstruction and petroleum interests. Once poured, its viscous, sealant body blackens and conceals existing ecologies and communal routes paved by local knowledge. Asphalt both extracts and fills. It penetrates through difficult terrain, making contact with semi-isolated communities structured around customary land use, localised labour, and systems of governance predating the modern state. On the Kakavijë–Gjirokastër highway that crosses from Albania to Greece, asphalt, made and installed using Greek technology, reaches twenty-nine kilometres into Albanian space, materially and perceptually transforming it into a ‘Greek road’. 6 Covering disputed Albanian territory with Greek asphalt is a way this soft matter slips through boundaries, redrawing them not as lines on a map but by what hardens on the ground. Asphalt’s borders can also be as small as 250 x 670 cm, similar to that of a burial plot. On Canfield Drive, the repaving of a central section of the road is where teenager Michael Brown was shot by Officer Darren Wilson, atop the double yellow lines. Here, asphalt no longer guarantees continuity; it marks a rupture; the new darker asphalt patch becomes a commemorative marker for memory performance that eludes authority; its memories and materiality are made and remade through socially-determined rituals. These acts disrupt the flows of power by using bodily practices to reconstitute designed boundaries and behaviours. Asphalt is phenomenologically unstable – here, its opaqueness calls attention to what states seek to obscure.
Whitney Curtis for The New York Times
A plaque of a dove has been laid in concrete on the sidewalk to replace the impromptu memorial to Michael Brown in the middle of Canfield Drive in Ferguson, Missouri, where he died in 2014.
Dimitris Dalakoglou.
Road signs entering the cross-border highway from a Greek minority village, signs in Greek have been covered with paint, ca. 2017. 6 Dimitris Dalakoglou, The Road: An Ethnography of (Im) mobility, Space, and Cross-border Infrastructures in the Balkans . Manchester University Press, 2017
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on site review 48 :: building materials
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