Archive-Ruins

Abstract

Wadi Salib, a ruined neighborhood in Haifa, is a dense palimpsest of forced displacement, urban neglect, and contested redevelopment. Once home to Palestinian residents and later to Jewish Moroccan immigrants, it bears the material traces of successive expulsions and demolitions after 1948 and during later modernization campaigns. This chapter argues that encountering Wadi Salib’s ruins produces a distinctive mode of historical knowledge grounded in affect: the bodily, precognitive intensity through which loss, ambiguity, and unrealized futures register in the present. I propose an “affective historiography” that brings together two modalities, ruin affect and archive affect. Ruin affect arises from the atmospheric force of decay and temporal indeterminacy. Archive affect emerges in confronting fragmented, biased, or absent records, including “archives of feeling” in oral testimony and activist collections. Methodologically, the project combines 3D scanning, archival photographs, oral histories, and a custom small language model that extracts spatial references from manuscripts, enabling their reassembly into geolocated fragments. These datasets are linked through a relational graph and staged in web-based XR tours that align narrated testimony with scanned architectural elements. Rather than restoring a single narrative, the interface cultivates embodied encounters with multiple, competing pasts, surfacing suppressed histories, and modeling historiography as a situated, sensory, and ethically charged practice.