– Healing & Lactation Shrines: Sarah Mady

Luiza Prado and Sarah Mady discuss Mady’s research on specialised fertility, lactation and infant health shrines that are still found in Lebanon today. Sarah Mady is an archaeologist and educator, whose research is focused on healing shrines in North Lebanon that have been used since Late Antiquity by women and mothers of different faiths.  

As part of the research conducted for the Anti-Offsetting Primer, they talk about the spiritual and cultural practices of healing and how this is connected to wider changing ecosystems, rituals of repair, the politics of archaeology, and the religious and cultural heritage of Lebanon.

The Anti-Offsetting Primer is an anticolonial inquiry into carbon offsetting in the arts. Carbon offsetting is a flawed policy tool that allows polluters to compensate for carbon dioxide emissions arising from industrial and other human activity. Through artistic-research and cooperative learning, Prado engages with various anticolonial practices to present other possible ways of doing art beyond extractivism.