Mined Land of Ours

15th May 2011, 63rd anniversary of the Nakba. The Palestinian refugees in Syria crossed the border, a mined land, marking the most serious physical attempt to return to their place of origin.

The imagery triggered many questions inside me, questions about my existence here and now, in this place, on this land, be it West Bank or Jerusalem. It made me question my position as a spectator, and as an addressed party in the event.

I went deeper into those questions. I started to track a connection between me and them, Us. Some of those people are from Yaffa like me, and most probably their families became refugees the same year my family moved from Yaffa to Jerusalem. They are returning now, to where I am now, they are returning to their lost land, a land that traumatized their memory for decades, a land that they identify with its loss, a loss trapping them in the melancholic existence of Refugees.

Do they really know what they are returning to?

Are they ready for this return?

Are they ready for a new trauma? Or maybe mourning?

Do they really want to be where I am now?

Weren’t we all at that moment marching back to our land through them?

Doesn’t that make us as Palestinians on this land more trapped and maybe more... Guilty.

I abstract this land, that is physically, mentally and politically mined

I abstract this land, turning it into a bleak, bare landscape, turning it into an abyss, an abyss of questions, an abyss that I hide behind, an abyss that makes their crossing of the Boarder like a vision of an infinite right, an infinite detour.

I abstract this land to purify it from history.

I abstract this land to open it up.