Shoroq Alashqar | شروق الأشقر

Shoroq Alashqar is a Saudi full-time mum that has an interior Design bachelor's background from the University of the Arts London and turned into a 'City Designer' at the Royal College of Art. She is a multidisciplinary designer and a Visual Artist, constantly exploring the influences of the Middle Eastern social environment on women’s invisible labour. She passionately examines the effects of her cultural heritage on public landscapes.

Her work typically achieved thorough brainstorming, followed by experimentation with raw materials, archives collection, and purpose-driven filmmaking to facilitate her outlook and appreciation of the micro-positions of individuals/objects and through to the macro-positions of a larger context.

Unfolding the Eucalypt is a decolonised Eucalyptus tree installation that narrates the history of Eucalyptus’s complex political, cultural and ecological position on a local, in Palestine, as well as global level.

By experimenting with eucalyptus leaves, bark, charcoal, and scent, Shoroq explores the tainted history of this tree, first from the Palestinian territory outside Akka in a village named Elmanshyieh. This land was used as an experimental landscape by the British "experts" who operated Eucalyptus agricultural experiments during the mandate, with an excuse of draining the swamps to avoid disease when in fact the trees were used as a source of timber to expand the mandate's authority.

On the global level, the eucalyptus is native to Australia and was used by Aboriginals for healing and practising multiple forms of ceremony and ritual. The tree was displaced and dispossessed by the colonies and became a weapon in negotiating boundaries of cities, as was the case in apartheid South Africa, and it was also used as a tool to build more efficient factories and was used for mass scale paper production in Portugal.

The installation uses homemade recycled paper using eucalyptus leaves and burnt bark to make her charcoal as a form of intimacy and closeness with the genus and a tool for storytelling from within.