Design Map · Eindhoven
The Dead Are Never Inert رماد مسكون
Graduation project by Raghad Saqfalhait at Design Academy Eindhoven, 2026. Shown during Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven on Design Map, location F5.
‘The Dead Are Never Inert’ is a multimedia installation that turns to ash, a fundamental component of archaeological soils in Palestine, to reconsider how the land is read, inhabited and valued. While artefacts are extracted, classified and used to construct narratives that are weaponised in the dispossession of Palestinians from their land, Raghad Saqfalhait’s research instead centres on the discarded archaeological soils, which she terms ‘the discard of the discard’. Through film, performance and live analogue projection, the installation takes sakan — Arabic for both ‘ash’ and ‘to inhabit’ — as its point of departure, showing that ash is a living matter not just semantically but materially. By sifting soil beyond the point of scientific value, where it starts to take on a cosmological dimension, the project invites visitors to encounter the land not as a passive archive of the past but as living ground continually formed through inhabitation, cultivation and transformation.