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جميع المشاريع
I carried a "Palestine" within me long before I could walk its hills. I carried it through stories, through fragments of photographs, through the gestures and words of my parents, who left their land and built another life far away.
I returned at the age of sixteen. I call it a return even though I had never left myself; every Palestinian returns. Yet the hills, the valleys, the stones, the air were not of the "Palestine" I had imagined. The land was both familiar and strange. It had been named, mapped, sanctified, symbolized, occupied, liberated, studied, photographed, and written about in countless ways. It was well known, and yet I did not know it. I longed for a quieter encounter. Something personal, intimate, unclaimed.
My journey became a search for this encounter. I walked the central hills, moving slowly through thistle fields and along ancient paths. I listened to the landscape carrying its own burden, speaking in a language of its own. I began to gather fragments, old and new, stitching them together in my negatives, assembling composite images that exist somewhere between the Palestine I know and the Palestine I am still learning to know.
This work is tender and violent. It cuts and reconnects. It fractures and repairs. Through analogue photography, fragmentation mirrors the transformations imposed on the land. Reassembly becomes a quiet reclamation, a gesture that turns remembrance into making. In these images, memory is not only recalled, but also felt, shaped, and held close again.
