Huda Takriti – once upon a time they thought the end would come from above, 2026

Thousands of circular pits puncture the archaeological site of Apamea in Syria, turning the ancient city into a scarred landscape visible from satellite images. Dug by treasure hunters searching for buried antiquities, these excavations destroy the archaeological layers through which history can be reconstructed. Since 2011, the looting of Syrian cultural heritage has fuelled an international trade in antiquities while irreversibly altering thousands of archaeological sites. Combining documentary research with speculative fiction, Huda Takriti imagines these sites of erasure through the voices of dust particles carried by the wind. Moving across landscapes repeatedly turned over in the search for buried wealth, these non-human agents bear witness to the transformation of archaeological remains into commodities and to the disappearance of the histories embedded in the ground.

Huda Takriti’s work engages with archives, memory and the conditions through which histories are constructed and transmitted. Moving across installation, video, sculpture, sound and text, she creates environments that foreground absence, fragmentation and erasure. Rather than reconstructing a coherent narrative, she attends to gaps and discontinuities, questioning how authority is established and how historical knowledge is shaped by what is preserved, omitted or withheld.