How does unearthing soil, sediments, remnants, and buried life-forms open up space for concealed voices and histories, and reveal interconnected systems of power and violence on people and place? As part of a larger research-based curatorial project, my work considers artistic practices that trace the racialized and gendered relationship between bodies and land, and question narratives of socioecological crisis that contribute to the displacement and erasure of people and collective formations. The research aims to think with the land—materially and relationally—in order to unpack and historicize notions of contamination and waste as they relate to the politics of access and the violence of land allotment. For this paper, I will discuss these considerations through the practice of Palestinian artistic duo, Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme. Their long-term investigation, "And yet my mask is powerful," confronts the apocalyptic imaginary and violence that dominates our contemporary moment. It asks what happens to people, place, and things when a living fabric is destroyed. The multi-media project uses the trips taken by young Palestinians to the sites of their destroyed villages inside Israel, as an avatar for rethinking the site of the wreckage. The ruin becomes the very material from which to trace the faint contours of another possible time. Besides, by looking at environmentalism through the lens of race, class, and gender, my paper will further explore how the materiality of land permeates our identities and representational structures, and simultaneously molds the body. My research will consider these issues through the writings of decolonial scholars who have exposed the way in which land—its use and its visuality—is tied to marginalized groups. This includes theorist Karen Barad, who considers queer ecology by rethinking distinctions between humans and less-than-humans, as well as the past and the future, which enables us a different take on questions of land use. It also includes philosopher Jane Bennett’s work on vibrant matter, which reflects on the vitality of materiality in relation to the world of humans, non-human life, and things. Additionally, it will examine philosopher Édouard Glissant’s writings on opacity, to further analyze how landscapes reveals buried histories and colonial pasts through their fissures. Barad, Karen. “Nature’s Queer Performativity.” Kvinder, Køn og forskning/ Women, Gender and Research. Copenhagen, 2012, No. 1-2. Bennett, Jane, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010. Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. Trans. Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1997.