Cultural heritage has become a cornerstone of how nations define themselves and yet the concept – like that of the nation state itself – is a phenomenon that has only come into being recently. The matrix of the nation state, the nationalism necessary to produce and construct the state-based origin stories has had a significant impact on cultural heritage and the very modern processes of re-narrating the past. This forms a durational conceit, pushing and pulling the past from the present, with a view towards supporting future continuities, effectively producing a temporal collapse.

Durations of the Nations: Robinson’s Arch attempts to respond to this complex matrix through the framework of archaeological imagery by responding to Moshe Milner’s photograph for the Israeli Government Press Office. The photo shows an excavation in 1969 at the foundations of what is known as Robinson’s Arch. Named after the American biblical scholar Edward Robinson who claims to have discovered it in 1838, its function is said to have connected the town of Jerusalem to the ancient Temple Mount. It hangs strangely off the wall abutting al-Aksa Mosque above the site where Milner’s photo was taken. The image and Robinson’s Arch demonstrate the modern problems associated with framing the past and the ways in which knowledge production informs identity formation processes.

By actively fragmenting the image in my intervention, Durations of the Nations questions these processes: Robinson’s identification in 1838, a year before the first photograph of Palestine was produced with all the baggage that such framing of the Western biblical imaginary brought; through the Zionist re-periodisation of such a charged archaeological excavation site just two years after the capture of East Jerusalem in the June war; and also through the – kind – invitation of a Palestinian cultural institution to respond to the image through an artistic intervention.

While the arch may have once been a physical connector in the city, the fragmentation of the image disrupts many other complex associative connections surrounding the matrix of nationalism and cultural heritage.