In 1869 French sculptor and photographer Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi proposed a monumental lighthouse for the entrance of the Suez Canal. Deeply inspired by nineteenth-century Orientalism and Egypt's ancient monuments, he envisioned what he called Progress Carrying the Light to Asia: a colossal Egyptian peasant woman raising a lantern as a beacon of "civilization." The monument was never built. Instead, Bartholdi transformed the proposal into the sculpture that would later become the Statue of Liberty in New York City.

By reconstructing the monument's hand, Heba Y. Amin returns Bartholdi's unrealized proposal to the landscape it was meant to occupy. The gesture borders on the absurd: a fragment of a monument that never existed, recovered as though it were an archaeological relic. In appropriating Bartholdi's fantasy, the work reveals how easily political symbols migrate, shedding one history to acquire another. What begins as a discarded colonial proposal becomes a national icon elsewhere, exposing the mechanisms through which monuments manufacture origin stories, while quietly forgetting the acts of appropriation, displacement, and erasure on which they depend.