“These stills are from my video installation, “Projecting Topographies: Imaging Sand as a Site of Violence and Resistance in Gaza.” This piece maps Gaza’s topography as a site of both military intervention and material resistance, examining the lineage of colonial vision and land intervention across scales and colonial regimes. From afforestation practices implemented during the British Mandate’s Sand Drift Ordinance to Israeli colonization of the dunes between 1970 and 2005, sand is implicated in colonial taxonomies of “dead” land and mechanisms of expropriation despite Palestinian practices of dune cultivation and collective ownership. Simultaneously, sand resists these mechanisms in both representation and materiality, defying cartographic imperatives of fixity and colonial toxicity.
This work engages archival research, cartography, satellite image processing, analogue film, and desktop recordings to examine these modes of resistance and violence across scales. It renders visible the materiality of these processes through methods of collage and image treatment. ”
