Dima Srouji participates in the fourth edition of Amman Design Week, taking place from 2–17 October 2026 under the theme Accumulations. Conceived as a platform for exchange between designers, students, businesses and the wider public, Amman Design Week brings together a diverse programme of exhibitions, commissions, learning initiatives and mentorship opportunities, foregrounding design as a means of engaging with social, cultural and environmental questions.
For this year’s edition, Srouji presents Natural Residents (أهل البيت), an installation rooted in the landscape and layered histories of Iraq al Amir, a village west of Amman known for its archaeological remains, abundant water sources and the monumental Qasr al Abed.
The work takes its point of departure from a diary entry dated 17 October 1904 by Frederick A. Norris, a surveyor working alongside archaeologist Howard Crosby Butler at Iraq al Amir. In his account, Norris describes an early morning walk to the brook, where he bathed beneath the oleanders after asking permission from Bedouin women. His description offers a fleeting glimpse into the landscape as a living environment—one shaped by water, vegetation, people and everyday encounters.
At the centre of Srouji’s installation is Qasr al Abed, the imposing Hellenistic structure that stands on a raised terrace overlooking the valley. Long imagined as a grand and inhabited castle, archaeological research reveals that its construction remained unfinished following the death of its patron, Hyrcanus, in 175 BCE. While the structure itself was never completed or inhabited, the landscape surrounding it has long sustained an abundance of life. Water from creeks, natural springs and a manmade lake has nourished the ecology of Iraq al Amir for centuries.
Natural Residents reimagines this relationship between architecture and landscape, proposing nature itself as the inhabitant of Qasr al Abed. Figs, abundant in the village today, and snails, which once moved slowly along its waterways, are brought together within the ruin as imagined residents. Through these forms, Srouji considers the ways in which landscapes retain traces of life beyond the human, and how ecological histories can persist alongside, within and around architectural remains.
The installation also draws upon archival material from the Howard Crosby Butler Archive at Princeton University, including an archaeological drawing of the site on which a snail has been reintroduced by the artist. These archival fragments become points of departure rather than fixed historical records, allowing Srouji to layer past and present, documentation and imagination.
The glass elements within the installation are produced through Palestine’s continuing yet increasingly fragile glassmaking industry, connecting the work to another material history shaped by place, craft and cultural continuity. In bringing these hand-formed objects back into the landscape of Iraq al Amir, Srouji creates a dialogue between archaeological remains, contemporary craft and the enduring presence of nature.
With Natural Residents, Srouji approaches the archaeological site not as a static monument, but as an evolving ecosystem—one in which the landscape, rather than the unfinished castle, becomes the enduring protagonist.
Natural Residents opens at Iraq al Amir on 2 October 2026 as part of Amman Design Week’s fourth edition.
