work in progress 1 — saminasira

SAMINA SIRAJ
SELECTED WORKS

ONGOING WORK II

In the Beauty of Nature, there is meaning for All Life.
Seek it Out, and You will Know God.

Field Notes

It is never we who affirm or deny something of a thing; it is the thing itself that affirms or denies something of itself in us.
--Baruch Spinoza (Cited in Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy)

September Menstrual Cycle

Field Notes

The accidental unearthing of a 4,500-year-old goddess head, Anat, occurred a year before the genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza in 2023. The serpent-crowned Canaanite goddess of love and war signaled a moment in which ancestral presence emerged through the intelligence of nonhuman forces and chose its witness. For Palestinians, identity is rooted in reciprocity with terrestrial, aquatic, and aerial worlds, all woven through relations of kinship between human and nonhuman life. Under occupation, these environmental systems are systematically weaponized: ancestral olive groves are uprooted, farmlands are polluted, homes are demolished, and access to clean water is severely restricted. Meanwhile, Gaza’s coastal culture exists under the shadow of a heavily militarized sea. “The real danger comes from the skies.” An article published on July 11, 2024, documenting 9 months into the genocide shows this effectively: “The bombs have contaminated the soil. You can see it in the pictures, the land is burnt and black. It’s not a comfortable habitat for scorpions or snakes. The war has affected all living creatures, all signs of life, most of the land, the stones,” said Imad Atrash, executive director at Palestinian Wildlife Society in the West Bank. In this necropolitical landscape, specifically in Gaza, settler colonialism has violently restructured local ecosystems and disrupted native relationships to land and water. Anat’s reemergence becomes an act of anticipatory readiness. Walter Benjamin’s notion of history “flashing up at a moment of danger” offers a framework for understanding this temporal opening: a fragment of the past asserting itself precisely when the threat of erasure is most acute. Here, ecological, symbolic, and material forces organize in ways that defy human orchestration. Nonhuman materiality intervenes as an autonomous agent, testifying to memory, truth, and justice. Outside the gaze of occupation, institutional authority, state excavation, or curatorial mediation, serpent symbolism, deeply rooted in Ancient Palestine, coils upward on an ordinary day, choosing to be witnessed by a Gazan farmer plowing the land. The land, as a sentient, legal, and political being, holds a geological record of extraction, conquest, empire, and oppression. Anat is a reminder that the ancestors and ecology are ethical interlocutors that recognize harm and generosity. And even when human systems deny justice, the land works in obscure and mysterious ways to restore balance.

Snakes in Albanian–Kosovan culture function as spiritual protectors embedded in architecture, oral mythology, jewelry, and everyday domestic belief. It shows ways ancestral cosmologies across centuries of migration, conversion, and political upheaval reflect a continuum of a prehistoric Illyrian snake cult, in which serpents were seen as living household guardians and ancestral spirit keepers tied to the foundation of the home itself. Carved into arches, rooflines, and thresholds, these ornamental motifs marked the boundary between safety and danger, while serpent-shaped jewelry acted as portable amulets that extended the household’s spiritual shield onto the body. The cosmology collapses the divide between human, animal, and land—casting the snake as symbol, ancestor, and intermediary between visible and invisible worlds.

In Greece and Armenia, the snake lives quietly in the corners of the house. It is fed with milk to ward off harm and serves as an ancestral guardian spirit. In Albania and Kosovo, as seen previously, it coils above arches and thresholds. Similarly, it takes me back to Pompeii, where snake altars (lararia) were often placed in kitchens or courtyards because these were the heart of domestic life. The snake represented the household’s guardian spirit, tied to fertility, abundance, and protection. Families made daily offerings—like food or wine—to keep the house prosperous and safe. These shrines were woven into everyday rituals around cooking and family life. These findings support the serpent as a threshold keeper: a bridge between worlds that are domestic and spiritual but also living and ancestral. Whether it’s the foundation of a Balkan home, the hearth of an Armenian or Greek household, or a deity in the kitchens of Pompeii to bring luck, the serpent’s multifaceted role shows up as protector, luck-bringer, and silent inhabitant. These carvings, reliefs, and myths are like different dialects of the same language. It’s a language in which the serpent isn’t feared but invited in, fed, honored, and trusted to hold the boundary. Across time and geography, the serpent becomes a shared archetype of home, memory, and power.