The Installation
A curated installation at Cal Poly Kennedy Library
Decolonizing the Gallery
On January 24, 2025, Mawtini officially launched with a public installation in the Cal Poly Kennedy Library gallery, on display until March 20. The installation consists of a curated display of some of the main themes of the collection, along with displays of personal objects provided by the narrators, and some archival materials.
Being conscious that we were making our Arab American community visible in a predominantly White institutional space in which Arabs are not usually acknowledged or valued, we carefully considered how to put our collection on display without replicating historical harms associated with cultural exhibitions.
From the 18th to early 20th centuries, European colonial powers collected artifacts, flora and fauna, and human remains from colonized regions, including the Middle East, to be put on display in world's fairs, modern museums, art galleries, and commercial exhibitions throughout Europe and the United States. These institutions did not just display objects: they classified and ordered the world into racial hierarchies that placed Europeans at the pinnacle of "universal" knowledge, beauty, civilization, and progress, legitimizing the "civilizing" missions of modern empires. Exhibitions, in other words, were tools of colonial power that masked the violence and exploitation behind the displays.
Historical San Luis Obispo had its own share of such exhibitions. In 1875, the Tribune advertised the arrival of:
“"the great Arab and Mexican troupe of acrobats and gymnasts," including "El Nino Arabe, or the boy Arab … renowned for his contortion acts in which he impresses the beholder with the idea that he has no bones in his body."”
— San Luis Obispo Tribune, August 28, 1875
While such shows existed since medieval times, it was during the 19th century that they became more commercially successful and mainstream in Europe and the United States, when "human zoos" explicitly put colonized peoples on display for their "unusual" biological differences that distinguished them from White bodies.
As an installation containing the voices, words, photographs, and objects of Arabs collected and curated under the leadership of other Arabs, we did not want to "exhibit" our community as a spectacle to observe. Instead, the installation was designed to immerse visitors into our worlds as Arab Americans, not to mark out our differences but to explore how our memories and lives may intersect with those of others exploring the space.
Photos coming soon
Photos coming soon
Photos coming soon
Objects of Affection
In our effort to decolonize the idea of the "exhibition," the Mawtini installation also included displays of "objects of affection" contributed by the project's narrators.
Under colonialism, millions of objects like tools, jewelry, clothing, utensils, ornaments, and other personal belongings looted from the Middle East were never meant to be displayed in the "white cube" of the European museum. They were plundered and severed from the societies in which these items held everyday purpose and meaning before they were turned into ahistorical art pieces for the viewing pleasure of the Western gaze. Colonialism destroyed the material and cultural worlds in which these objects were once at home, and millions of people were displaced through this destruction—many of whom, like our narrators, were forced to seek out new places to feel at home again.
We tend to think of the plundering of objects and the forced migration of people from their homelands as two separate processes, as if it were the nature of artifacts to exist outside of their communities, to come to being as museum objects, to be out of reach of those who felt at home in their midst—as if it were the nature of certain people to exist bereft of the worldly objects among which their inherited knowledge and rights, protective social fabric and safety, bliss and happiness, sorrow and death are inscribed.
Rather than existing outside and beyond the lifeworlds of the people for whom they have meaning, the objects displayed in the Mawtini installation are intimately integrated with the memories, experiences, and knowledge recorded in their owners' oral histories.
Some of the objects contributed by the Mawtini narrators for the installation traveled long distances in the closely guarded possession of their owners as they migrated away from their homelands. Others were passed down as family heirlooms. Still others were acquired in the process of building a new home in a new place. Taken together, they exist here "as proof of one's place in the world, as delegates of people's worlds in the new formations into which they were forcibly integrated."
Photos coming soon
Photos coming soon
Photos coming soon
Photos coming soon
Arabs in the Archive
In the 1970s, feminist scholars developed the concept of "symbolic annihilation" to describe what happens to members of marginalized groups when they are omitted, vilified, or trivialized by mainstream media.
Archival scholars have expanded the concept of symbolic annihilation to also refer to the absence of materials in American institutional archives and information repositories documenting the histories of certain communities, like Arab Americans, who are treated "simply as if [they] did not exist."
Indeed, a student-led search into the Kennedy Library's Special Collections and Archives files found minimal materials on Arab Americans in San Luis Obispo. Most were newspaper articles from past iterations of the Cal Poly student-run newspaper (now called Mustang News), and one box containing materials from the old Arab Club that existed in the 1960s-70s. Some of these rare finds were displayed at the installation. This archival void reflects the invisibility that many Arab students, faculty, and staff members have expressed feeling at Cal Poly, particularly recently.
As an oral history and community archiving project, Mawtini aims to confront and counter the ongoing symbolic annihilation of Arab Americans in mainstream archives, media discourses, and academic institutions.
Photos coming soon
Photos coming soon
By bringing oral history out of the archive and into public space, we hope to foster empathy, challenge stereotypes, and celebrate the rich diversity of Arab American communities.