Widow

Photography, 2017

In the series Widow, large-scale photographs of olive trees covered in quarry dust symbolize a region suffocated by the Occupation, yet still enduring and resisting the violence of this landscape. The images are pigment on rice paper, unframed and hung so that the paper curls and responds to the breeze. In an interview with a grandmother who lives in Jama’een, now squeezed between a quarry and a settlement, she describes the dust's effects on her health and her inability to leave the house, lamenting the destruction of the fig, orange, and olive groves she frolicked in during her youth.

Context
There are over 350 quarries in the Occupied Palestinian Territories of the West Bank. The saffron coloured limestone excavated is termed the 'white oil' of Palestine and is the only raw material available to support the Palestinian economy and provides a livelihood for over 20,000 workers. However, of the stone and sand excavated from the quarries 65% is expropriated by Israel for the construction of Israel, and to build the illegal settlements in the West Bank, with Israel also exporting the stone internationally and claiming it as their own product. Bound to the history and visual vernacular of occupation through bylaws in Jerusalem, the stone is used as a conveyor of emotional messages around notions of a sacred city and ‘homeland’ for the Jewish people. Today almost every hillside in the West Bank is scarred by the brutal incision of the quarries. The land is pillaged and defaced, its wound left open to reveal a 'geology of disaster'.

RELATED WORKS AND RESOURCES
Quarries of Wandering Form
White Oil
In Search Of Kafka
Birzeit, Geology of Disaster
Ashdod
World of Matter

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