"A tangible connection to cultural re-use: to preserve the Shunet as a ruin so that we can follow the genesis of the structure and how it changes as things are rubbed out and drawn over, while the traces of the earlier versions of the its histories continue to be clear"

Preservation of the ancient mud-brick structure in the spirit of a renovation project – an act of repair – where the work dissolves, or integrates, in the way a transplanted organ must; both parties, the host and the transplant are at play here. In the integration, there is the disappearance of the architectural gesture, revealed in the subsequent gesture of the reconstituted whole.

Shubhra Raje was a member of the ongoing archaeological project at Abydos sponsored jointly by the NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts and Princeton University (field seasons 2011-12).