Maria Thereza Alves’s research-based work unearths silenced histories from different localities. Her relational site-specific projects respond to the immediate physical and social environment and aim to create spaces of agency and visibility for the oppressed. She mostly focuses on interventions in land and empowers a language for organic growth in opposition to the regimented and controlled. Her long-term project Seeds of Change (2002–ongoing) considers ideas of commerce, ecology, colonialism and migration as she follows the movement of seeds that have been dispersed by cargo ships carrying both passengers and goods. And Then The Birds Flew Over is a discrete intervention in the Palestinian Museum composed of a three-metre tall pile of earth and a pond of water. With this simple proposition, Alves has enabled a natural environment to flourish, with new vegetation unexpectedly growing in the otherwise manicured gardens of the Museum. Purposefully placed within the slabs of rocks in the ‘Garden of Resistance’, this soil mound celebrates growth from the otherwise static and inanimate. This work was done in cooperation with the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Centre, where the artist had an exhibition of commissioned works on view between 16 September - 20 October 2017, curated by Lara Khaldi. And Then The Birds Flew Over, 2017.
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