Partitions have been built for thousands of years. They have been variously admired, attacked and justified, yet each represents human intolerance and a chasm between people. Shadow on the Walls, a project by interdisciplinary researcher and designer Mariam Shamma, tells the story of these man-made barriers — from ancient fortifications to contemporary enclosures. The project examines the notion of constructing impediments to either exclude or confine others, shedding light on the complexities behind such decisions.
Project by Mariam Shamma
Text by Kirsten Algera
Text by Kirsten Algera
Walls are often built as a result of political disputes and land grabbing. As a Emirati-Palestinian, Shamma experienced through her family how the construction of a wall not only brings about physical exclusion, but also exerts a major psychological effect. “Walls are not just barriers to keep people in or out. They are also a form of speech. Their architecture embodies subjugation and separation.” Robin Niblett, a specialist in international relations, states that walls “are like sanctions – easy to impose but difficult to remove. Walls are easy to build but they’re difficult to break down.”
Morocco–Spain, 2001, Bulgaria–Turkey, 2014, Mexico-United States, 2017, Israel-Gaza, 1994
By exploring the physical manifestation of the wall, Shamma wants to gain a better understanding of the ramifications of persecution. Shadow on the Walls found its inspiration in the meaning of walls in present-day politics. An expanding digital database offers an overview of walls around the world as “visual representations of oppression”. The immersive platform challenges the conventional objectivity of historical accounts, which often focus on facts and figures alone. It also contains photographs, drawings and 3D, design studies, and the graffiti and writing that adorn them, as well as an annotated bibliography.“I hope,” Shamma writes, “that the platform shatters the fallacy that ‘the grass is always greener on the other side’. It seeks to epitomize the profound shade cast by these walls and the inherent darkness that accompanies them.”
Greece-Turkey, 2012, Greece-Turkey, 2021, Turkey-Syria, 2015,
Kuwait-Iraq, 1991
Kuwait-Iraq, 1991
The diagrams are part of Mariam Shamma’s Shadow on the Walls project.
