I finally saw Emily Jacir’s memorial sewn into a refugee tent at Documenta a few weeks ago. To

I finally saw Emily Jacir’s memorial sewn into a refugee tent at Documenta a few weeks ago. To create the work, Jacir opened her studio for several weeks in the middle of 2001 for anyone to come by, sew, drink, converse, and sing together. The names they sewed into the canvas tent were names of the 418 Palestinian villages destroyed by the Israeli occupation in 1948, as documented by Walid Khalidi in his crucial book All That Remains. As Jacir describes, the project brought together a loose community of friends and family, many of them children of the Palestinian diaspora who had never seen their homeland, others Israelis who had grown up in the occupied territories. This community of people is materially instantiated in the preserved physical labor of their communal embroidery, as well as a binder that Jacir displays alongside the tent that contains a simple list of every person who participated on each day of the project. On one side of the tent the names are outlined but not fully sewn in, a reference perhaps to the memory as an ongoing never finished process, as well as the countless people, families, and communities that have been erased without a trace of documentation. This project took place in the months immediately preceding September 11, 2001. As such is it a memorial to another point in history as well, a time when somehow American Islamophobia wasn’t quite as damaging and systemic as it is now.Emily Jacir, Memorial to 418 Palestinian Villages which were Destroyed, Depopulated, and Occupied by Israel in 1948, 2001 -- source link

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