Artists: Marianne Fahmy, Joyce Joumaa, Huda Takriti, Hasan Özgür Top 

Curated by Chiara Cartuccia

As Stones on Their Palms, Embers and Flame (after Fadwa Tuqan) explores the entanglement of ruination with histories of anticolonial resistance, uprising, revolution, and political radicalism across the Mediterranean. Ruins are not understood here as inert remnants of the past, but as charged terrains where capitulation and endurance meet — “negative commons” that, while bearing the traces of decay and dispossession, also harbour the promise of resurgence, inscribing a field of struggle where memory, imagination, and desire intersect. They are inseparable from the gestures that produced them and from those that rise in their wake: acts of disobedience and steadfastness, carrying within them the dual fate of defeat and victory.

The exhibition brings together four artists whose work engages these conditions through distinct yet convergent strategies: addressing ruins as mnemonic sites and speculative devices, where remembrance sparks projections of futures beyond catastrophe; tracing cycles of social ruination in the light of revolutionary pasts and presents, exposing how collapse and germination fold into one another; interrogating archaeology and the archival as technologies of domination, disciplines that fabricate legitimacy, monumentalise defeat, and erase insurgent memory. Ruin is seized as a terrain of confrontation, where violence is neither concealed nor disavowed, but recognised as integral to the generative force of political transformation. The exhibition’s lexicon also unsettles the figure of the “hero,” shifting the viewer’s attention toward collective gestures of defiance, sacrifice, and repetition. Resistance is reframed not as a singular, continuous triumphal gesture, but as a recurring, obstinate rhythm — the persistence of bodies standing, falling, and rising again.

As Stones on Their Palms, Embers and Flame positions ruin as both wound and weapon, at once scar and arsenal. From this unstable ground, between dust and ignition, new solidarities and configurations of struggle erupt. In the interstices of destruction and creation, political imagination endures.


Chiara Cartuccia is a curator, writer, and researcher. Her ongoing long-term research enquires into the Mediterranean as an invented/inventive geography, focusing on the ramifications of practical Mediterraneanism(s) in Euro-Mediterranean contexts.

She is co-founder and director of the curatorial and editorial platform EX NUNC. She has held curatorial positions at SAVVY Contemporary (Berlin), and Manifesta Biennial (Palermo/Amsterdam), for which she co-curated the Manifesta 12 Planetary Garden Public Programme (2018). She has curated exhibitions, and discursive and performative programmes at The Showroom London, Goldsmiths College, Goethe-Institut Bulgaria, Venice International Performance Art Week, ICA Sofia, TBA21, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, La Escocesa, and more. As visiting curator at UNIDEE – Cittadellarte-Fondazione Pistoletto (2022–2024), she curated Neither on Land nor at Sea, a biennial research project that addresses the Mediterranean as an unrooted geography (a site of unstable negotiation and world-making), developed through residencies and public programming. Cartuccia (co-)edited Manifesta 12. The Planetary Garden Reader (Het Nieuwe Instituut, 2018), Place Holder (BOZAR, 2022), Neither on Land nor at Sea. Catalogue (UNIDEE, 2024), and Holding Place (Viaindustriae, 2025), part of the international project Alexandria: (Re)Activating Common Urban Imaginaries. She contributes regularly to magazines, catalogues, and independent publications. Since 2024, she has been a tutor at DAI Dutch Art Institute, as part of Archive Ensemble.