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Abstract
In her Terra Infirma analysis of geography’s visual culture, Irit Rogoff suggested that geography as we have traditionally known it might be today a language in crisis, unable to convey the changes undergone in our days in terms of lifestyle, space, inhabitation and belonging (ROGOFF 2000 : introduction). In turn, she argued that alternative strategies to review our relationship with the inhabited space had lately emerged. In this sense, she explained, the artistic production had become a central means to delve into and record new modes of spatial belonging and spatial interaction. Jumana Emil Abboud often explores in her work alternative ways of reconnecting with/to the homeland she returned to after more than 10 years away, a land she daily sees changing. In this artistic exploration, a visual cartography of latency emerges, one that re-collects, navigates and keeps alive a Palestine made of personal memories, community experiences and perpetuated imaginaries embedded in its landscape. Ghoulehs, brides, anthropomorphic animals or surreal landscapes populate Jumana’s colorful drawings, in which she delves into the supernatural universe of Palestinian folklore and storytelling and their inextricable connection to body, nature, matter and land. Long static landscape shots fulfill her video installations Maskuneh and Hide your water from the sun¸ in which her journeys through a vanishing and fragmented landscape searching for the once believed haunted spots gathered by Tawfiq Canaan in the 20’s, are put forward. Following these two creative strands, her drawings and video installations, the aim of this intervention is to explore, under the lenses of Rogoff’s proposal, the alternative, intimate and processual re-presentations of the land deployed and constructed in/by Jumana’s production. Their unfolding in the interstitial convergence of individual and collective memory, vital trajectory, mobility and immobility, imagination, folklore, (hi) storytelling and personal experience of place is of particular interest. This analysis will be more broadly framed within the practice of landscape representation in the arts, here conveyed through the colorful drawing and the mobile image that activate the multiple and intersecting spatio-temporal layers of a permanently negotiated topography.
Discipline
Art/Art History
Geographic Area
Palestine
Sub Area
19th-21st Centuries