![]() ![]() The collection presents a polyvocal and dynamic representation of issues, including Palestinian sovereignty, settler colonialism, the history of Zionism, and visual expressions of solidarity writ large.Īs we – two graduate students in the field of art history – explored this archive, we began to notice the preponderance of botanical imagery, landscapes and plant motifs present in these posters. What began as Daniel J Walsh’s class project during his time in the Arabic Studies department at Georgetown University has grown into a formidable resource: a collection of nearly 16,000 posters, as of the time of this writing (June 2022). One of the most vital and expansive of these is the crowdsourced digital archive of the Palestine Poster Project. ![]() The visual history of protest, activism and anticolonial liberation movements has spawned numerous archives, both digital and analog. However, they move beyond the tropes of longstanding nationalist ecological imagery to triangulate between landscape, memory and ongoing destruction, showing that the connection to homeland is rooted in a deep relationship with and knowledge of the land and the plants that inhabit it. I would not harm myself.’ Together, these two Palestinian filmmakers of different generations make a strong case for the centrality of land in articulating identity, indigeneity, citizenship and nationhood. She stages the interrogation of an older forager accused of damaging the landscape through his foraging, who poignantly notes that ‘I am a part of nature, nature is me… I am nature. Like Khleifi, Manna interviews elders to mine the relationship between landscape and memory. ![]() The film blends documentary, fiction and archival footage to mine the existential conflict between traditional Palestinian foraging practices and the Israeli state’s futile attempt to eradicate these practices through punitive criminalisation, while industrially cultivating those very same plants, including za’atar (thyme) and ’akkoub (an artichoke-like delicacy). This ecological imagination in Palestinian cinema, art and visual culture has likewise been taken up by a new generation of artists, including Jumana Manna in her recent film Foragers (2022). The short film ends as an elderly villager named Abu-Zaid tries to locate and identify the trees of his memory, including olive, fig and cactus, and narrates his fond recollections of almonds and apricots, all this among a proliferation of pine. The remains of the village of Ma’loul, destroyed in the 1948 Nakba (catastrophe), have since been covered with a pine forest (called the Balfour Forest) by the Jewish National Fund (JNF). I say snakeskin because I think some of the designs look like snakeskin scales.Michel Khleifi’s important 1985 documentary Ma’loul Celebrates its Destruction chronicles a community of internally displaced Palestinians’ devastating annual return to a homeland rendered unrecognisable. And that is how I discovered this snakeskin effect in my Shou Sugi ban wall hanging. Then I remembered that when I previously used the Shou Sugi Ban technique on this wall hanging if you burnt the wood it sanded very easily. I ended up spending an hour sanding the edges off. The only downfall was the square edges the router left in the wood. My next idea was to use a wood router and cut the wavy grooves, which worked like a bomb. I found it really hard going and after an hour I had only carved one wavy groove. Little did I realize that video was super speeded up. That appealed to me because it seemed to go pretty quick. I watched a couple of youtube videos on how to carve wood and I found a guy using a Die Grinder. It was not my intention for this project to be Shou sugi ban but here is how it happened. It was my laziness that resulted in this snakeskin-effect Shou sugi ban. The idea I had was to keep it simple at first and just carve wavy grooves into my wood. I am always trying to learn new skills and this one was next on my list. I had this idea in my head that I wanted to learn how to carve into wood. This project was one of those pleasant surprises you get when you cut corners and it pays off. ![]()
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