Institut für den Nahen und Mittleren Osten
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Linda Huke

Research fellow

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Background

Linda Huke is a MA student of art history at Freie Universität Berlin as well as a BA student of architecture at the University of the Arts, Berlin. Throughout her academic career she was investigating the relations between image-making, architecture and political struggle(s) in a globalized world. From 2016 to 2018 she was the student assistant for the research project “Affective Dynamics of Images in the Times of Social Media” at the CRC “Affective Societies” at Freie Universität Berlin. In 2015, she worked for the Goethe Institute and for Darat al Funun in the West Bank and in Jordan. Her writings include D. H. Saur (2017), in Affect Me. Social Media Images in Art, Exhibition Catalogue, KAI10 | Arthena Foundation, Düsseldorf, 11.11.2017-10.03.2018, pp. 164-169.

Research project

The design of the architectural complex in the muqata’a in Al-Bireh/Ramallah (West Bank), built between 2007 and 2016, is striking in several aspects. The grave cube of Yassir Arafat references the Kaaba in Mecca, while the mosque and the Yassir Arafat museum express a universal, reduced, modern architectural language. The administrative buildings of the Palestinian Authority, in contrast, rather relate to contemporary local building styles.
These aesthetic decisions have not been made randomly, but are part of a political agenda, transmitting the illusion of national independence, unity of the Palestinian people and of a powerful, functioning government. Nor is the choice of the site a random one, as the muqata’a is a symbol for the struggle against occupation. The first house on the ground was a British police station, built in 1940. After 1948, the compound was occupied by the Jordanian army, and from 1967 onwards by the Israeli army. Following the Oslo Accords in 1993, the muqata’a became the governmental headquarters of Yassir Arafat, who resided there until the complex was entirely destroyed by the Israeli army in 2002.
With this research project, I am trying to retrace the history of a contested site, looking for images that have been forgotten, using them to tell the story of occupation in Ramallah. I am asking how this occupation manifests through the architecture, and how space is organized to dominate people. What kind of narratives does the design of the buildings in the muqata’a relate to, and how was that in the past? How is trauma part of these narratives? How can we read the violent destruction of the architecture by Israeli bulldozers in 2002? And how is the colonial past of the site still influencing its integration into the urban fabric today? These are the main question I am exploring in my paper.