Symposium on Cultural Erasure

Cultural Erasure

Organised in collaboration with the Spatial Justice for Palestine Network (NL) and Ukraine-Netherlands Urban Network (UNUN), this symposium brought together scholars, architects, artists, and activists to explore the phenomenon of Cultural Erasure. Together we both reflected upon the conditions that lead to the destruction of cultural heritage as an aspect of warfare, as well as highlighted practices that creatively respond to it. 

The symposium foregrounds two urgent cases: Gaza, Palestine, and Ukraine, where radically different conditions are unfolding in real-time through Israel’s genocidal campaign and ethnic cleansing in the Gaza Strip, and through Russian destruction of urban infrastructure and architectural heritage across Ukraine. Considering these two different contexts together helped to illuminate the structural logics and political conditions through which cultural erasure operates across different political struggles.

Logics of targeted destruction and disappearance
In the immediate fog of war, when the toll on human life feels heaviest, the bombing of a medieval church, the staged demolition of a university campus, or the destruction of a historic theatre are often shrugged off by their aggressors as collateral damage and at best apologised for as such. Mostly however they are justified as necessary evils. Accepting such justifications at face value obscures the deeper logic and intentions behind such acts: deliberate forms of cultural erasure that are calculated, strategic, and inseparable from broader projects of domination.

Across history, patterns of cultural erasure follow strikingly similar logics. The destruction of architectural heritage; the targeting of cultural and academic institutions which sustain intangible knowledge systems; the desecration of burial sites and religious or spiritual sites; the plunder and transfer of historical collections and archives; the denigration of different knowledge systems and belief structures - all reveal how acts of cultural erasure consistently accompany and legitimise territorial violence. These assaults demonstrate that the assets and infrastructures of a society’s culture are not accidental casualties of war but rather targeted instruments of control; weapons whose impact extends far beyond the battlefield.

Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said (1994) described such practices as an “archaeology of erasure:” a systematic removal of cultural traces that renders histories and peoples invisible, rewriting landscapes to reflect the priorities of the powerful. These acts are the violent counterpart to more subtle mechanisms of domination: the rewriting of history, the expropriation of artifacts and their circulation beyond its control, and the framing of heritage preservation through Eurocentric paradigms that deny indigenous agency. By erasing material traces of memory and belonging, such violence seeks to erase peoples themselves, their narratives, their claims to land, and their visibility in the world.

From Loss to Reclamation: Symposium Program
This symposium addressed conditions of calculated destruction within a global and historical frame, foregrounding the systematic erasure of cultural, civic, and educational infrastructures in Gaza, Palestine, and Ukraine. It presented practices focused on the preservation and documentation of Palestinian and Ukrainian culture and cultural heritage, highlighting efforts to record and safeguard them. It featured counter-practices and acts of reclamation, where memory and presence are restored through traces, replicas, and poetic interventions of destroyed or disappeared material cultures.

Programme

12:30 Doors open

13:00 - 13:20 Welcome and introduction by the Independent School for the City and moderator Namaa Qudah 

13:20 - 14:15 Block #1 - Acknowledging Cultural Erasure, with presentations by Wouter Vanstiphout (Independent School for the City) and Arna Mačkić (Studio LA)

14:15 - 14:30 Short break 

14:30 - 15:25 Block #2 - Cultural Erasure in the Palestinian context with presentations by Namaa Qudah and Hiba Omari (Riwaq) 

15:25 – 15:40 Short break 

15:40 - 16:30 Block #3 - Cultural Erasure in the Ukrainian context with presentations by Valera Prorizna (Centre for spatial Technologies) and Ankie Petersen (Military Officer Cultural Heritage Protection). 

16:30 – 17:00 Panel conversation with all speakers and audience 

17:00 Drinks / aftertalk

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About the Speakers

Nama’a Qudah is an interdisciplinary feminist researcher who earned her doctoral degree in architecture from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands in 2024. Motivated by a commitment to challenging colonial knowledge production, her research centers on the architecture of displacement, particularly Palestinian refugee camps. Employing methods from architecture, visual arts, anthropology, and creative writing, her work seeks to uncover and analyze the spatial dynamics of displacement. Her professional career spans both practice and academia, with experience working in Germany, the UK, the Netherlands, and Jordan.

Wouter Vanstiphout is part of the Independent School for the City's dean team and partner of Crimson Historians & Urbanists. He is an architectural historian and researcher who has written extensively on urbanism and spatial politics. From 2008 - 2010, Wouter held the chair Design & Politics at the TU Delft and from 2012 to 2016, he was a member of the national advisory council on the environment and infrastructure.

Arna Mačkić is an architect and co-founder of Studio L A, whose work centers on public architecture as a catalyst for equality, dialogue, and remembrance. Her practice explores themes of loss, reconstruction, and the role of architecture in community recovery and shaping collective memory. Her acclaimed book Mortal Cities & Forgotten Monuments investigates the destruction and rebuilding of public spaces in Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and was named one of The Guardian’s best architecture books of the year.

Hiba Omari joined RIWAQ in 2019 as a development officer, where she leads fundraising initiatives and manages donor relations. She obtained her Master’s degree in Media, Art and Performance Studies from Utrecht University/ The Netherlands in 2019. She did her bachelors in Journalism/ Political Science at Birzeit University in 2016. Hiba is interested in heritage and cultural productions in Palestine and their relations to political and social transformations.

Valeria Prorizna worked as a producer on the project ‘A City within a building: The Mariupol Drama Theatre’ in collaboration with Forensic Architecture and the Center for Spatial Technologies, on the destruction of the Mariupol Drama Theatre on March 16, 2022; one of the iconic acts of cultural destruction by the Russian Federation and a prologue to the Russification of Mariupol and the erasure of its Ukrainian history and identity.

Ankie Petersen is a Military Officer in Cultural Heritage Protection with the Royal Dutch Armed Forces, leading Cultural Property Protection implementation, training, and civil-military projects. She advises the Atrocities Crime Advisory Group and UNESCO, and co-founded Holy Houses Rotterdam. With an MA in Heritage Studies and Design Cultures, she received the 2021 Monument Talent Prize for her contributions to cultural heritage.