Gestures of Enchantment

Digital Photography, 110x130 cm, 15 edtions, 2020

Thought: Resilience.During the intifada, a potato was used as a tool by Palestinian youth to debilitate the occupation machine with a simple act: they would stick nails into it, throw it in front of soldier cars and run. The soldiers would mistake the potatoes for stones and drive over them. The nails would flatten the wheels, causing an immediate shift in street power.

Gesture: Field-guid. Gratitude and giving back in return for what is received. In some languages, the term for plants translates to ‘those who take care of us.’

Observation: ‘The land knows you, even when you are lost.’ Names are place-based, and when they are lost, part of the place is also lost.

Thought: Wild Ones. To look at the history of colonialism/capitalism through the history of the female body and its missing accounts of activity that are not geared to the reproduction of everyday life, particularly wild female bodies: healers, disobedient wives, women who dared to live alone, and those who inspired enslaved people to revolt.

Observation: Wild Things. To look at the history of colonialism/capitalism from a botanical perspective and the position of wild vs. domesticated plants and its missing accounts of activity geared to the reproduction of everyday wisdom. Moreover, in colonialism, these activities have been subsumed to the reproduction of vegetation value only in relation to market value. Ancestral knowledge of the land and its wilderness, healing plants, and seasonal cycles were dismissed, a knowledge mostly held (and gave power) by (and to) women.

Gesture: From revolt to uprising. When time and intention were given to the potato, the nails allowed it to create an ecosystem of survival that exceeded its initial functional intention. The potato's age in the photo is one year and a half.

Gesture: Reclaiming enchantment. To see beauty and knowledge in the unseen. To appreciate the bitter sweetness of a brief moment of transcendent beauty. To let enchantment, shift your gaze from remoteness to insight, from insight to affinity. To allow small gestures to change you.

Gesture: Pathways. The original potato in its basic form was received from Khaled Jarrar in Bethlehem on 2nd of April, 2019. The gesture of nurturing it for an artwork happened over a year and a half from that date.