Ashdod

Photography, 2017

Part of Quarries of Wandering Form the series ‘Ashdod’ consists of still photographs depicting the industrial Port of Ashdod in Israel, 40 kilometres north of Gaza, at the mouth of the Lachish River, where most limestone from the OPT is shipped internationally. The singularity of the stone resonates with the universality of Zionist claims of an implacable right to appropriate in the name of the ‘chosen people.’ An audio interview with the Stone and Marble Union in Bethlehem reveals the judicial and legal issues surrounding Israel’s expropriation of the stone and how many products from Palestine are relabelled as ‘made in Israel’ at the ports of Haifa and Ashdod.

Quarries of Wandering Form (2014-17) is a body of work that incorporates photography and moving image to unearth the environmental, economic, geological, and political aspects of the quarries in the Occupied Palestinian Territories of the West Bank (OPT). The work emerged from five years of research in the region, where a highly contested set of relations between individuals (workers and owners), institutional forces (military), and broader constructs (nationalist identities and sovereign states) unfolded - relations overdetermined by the century-old settler colonisation of land.

The work consists of the film White Oil and a series of photographs , In Search Of Kafka, Widow,Birzeit, Geology of Disaster and Ashdod. These works explore the quarries as industrial spaces where labour, excavation, and expropriation of raw materials take place. And as an archive and cipher for the day-to-day lives of Palestinian workers, revealing narratives surrounding colonialism, land expropriation, and mobility.

RELATED WORKS AND RESOURCES

Quarries of Wandering Form
White Oil
In Search Of Kafka
Birzeit, Geology of Disaster
Widow
World of Matter

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