Contemporary film / video representations of the Palestinian landscape depict a place of current or imminent interruption, containment, danger, and violence. Central to this depiction are the bodies that look onto it, circulate around it, attempt to circumvent it, and police it. While they move, cohabit, persist, comply, and defy the conditions that mark the landscape as interrupted, their actions and gaze retain a memory of what it means to be connected to a land imagined as a place of origins and a place of plenitude for select groups. In this configuration, largely dependent on the role of the imaginary, there is no place without the human and yet there is increasingly no place for them if they are Palestinian. As both an artistic and documentary medium, film, like landscape art, always assumes a point of view, and has been uniquely efficient at giving visibility to the Palestinian subject, asserting as the early documentarians of the Palestine Film Unit and as Nadia Yaqub recently reminds us, that the act of self-representation is itself revolutionary and agential. Visibility of the Palestinian subject always suggests issues of dispossession, the struggle for rights, and the connection to the land, which cinema has the ability to fully convey whether capturing the trials of Palestinians to endure on the land and in their dwelling spaces, in 1948 historic Palestine, the West Bank and Gaza, or in the refugee camps and the wider diaspora. This paper will examine these issues as they are dealt with in certain films that cross the borders between documentary and fiction, including Khaled Jarrar’s Infiltrators, Kamal Aljafari’s Port of Memory, The Roof and Recollection, and Basma Alsharif’s Home Movies Gaza and Deep Sleep. In these and other films participating in Palestinian cinema, landscape becomes more than the visual representation of the land. It is also the internalized vision, memory, and dwelling place of home, even if that internalization is fragmented and always in process of becoming.

The first Palestinian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale opened in 2009 after months of confrontation with the Biennale management and the city government. The pavilion, curated by Salwa Mikdadi, featured seven artists from Palestine, including Emily Jacir. In her work “Stazione”, twenty-five specially selected ferry-stops in Venice were to be marked with the Arabic translation of the station name. Jacir deliberately chose places for her artwork that played an important role in the historical relations between Venice and the Middle East, such as for example the Arsenale, where the ships of the Crusaders were built and set off for Palestine, or the Fondaco dei Turchi, where Ottoman and Arab merchants could sell their goods. “Statione” interferes with the Venetian landscape and thus shows the invisible social connections that exist between Venice and Palestine. The station houses, which are well-known and characterize the cityscape of Venice, are transformed and supplemented by something that does not seem typical for Venice at first glance. Jacir opens the tourist view, on the one hand of the many Arab tourists in Venice, but also of the Biennale art elite, and the historical view of the many commercial and research visitors who travelled from Venice to Palestine or vice-versa. In the end, the landscape manifests itself a second time as a documentation in the pavilion itself and as a map to be distributed in various public places. In addition to photos of the ferry-stops and details of where to find them, the map also contains explanations of the significance of the locations for the intercultural history of Venice. However, about three months before the opening, the artwork had to be cancelled. The transport company withdrew their promised help in response to political pressure, and the mayor personally tried to convince Jacir to not realize the artwork. The Arabic translations were never put on the ferry-stops and the documentation wall remained empty in the Pavilion. Only the maps with the photomontages of the affixed translations were distributed, which gave the impression that the artwork took place. No notion of interference or censorship was ever presented to the public. The example of Emily Jacir's "Stazione" shows how the landscape is also perceived politically and that Arabic signs in Europe are erroneously understood as problematic. By using non-public archive material, I will demonstrate how strongly exhibitions from the Middle East are influenced when they enter public spaces in Europe.

From 1976 to 1978, Palestinian artist Samira Badran worked at an UNWRA-run women’s teacher training center in Ramallah, where she taught art to refugees living in adjacent camps. This paper considers three mixed-media drawings she produced during this period, which the artist herself considers “nightmarish;” entitled Twenty-Five Barrels, Jerusalem, and Glass City, these unconventional drawings shed light on the roles of magic and memory in the construction of Palestinian landscapes during the 1970s. Badran’s works do not immediately invoke landscapes, in the traditional sense of the term. The olive trees, orange groves, and sparkling sandstone buildings that populate the contemporaneous paintings of her peers are nowhere to be found in her imaginative, vivid compositions. Instead, Badran creates a world in which machines and everyday materials seem to take on lives of their own. Throughout the dense, intricate drawings, Badran thwarts her audience’s efforts to distinguish between the organic and the mechanical, creating a tangle of hybrid forms that appear simultaneously as creatures, objects, natural formations, and machines. The works share formal preoccupations with bundles and folds of fabric, tightly-wound coils of wire and rope, and pieces of broken machinery, and are populated by the artist’s hybrid creatures. There is a certain futility to them: they feature dwellings that cannot provide shelter, beings that cannot move, machines that do not seem to work. These drawings obey a logic inverse to that of Badran’s Palestinian contemporaries, who depicted the cities, villages, and natural landscapes of Palestine through lenses of longing and hope. They portrayed, realistically, a quasi-mythical Palestine rooted in thousands of years of heritage; their canvases convey a kind of magical thinking, an impossible desire to return to a way of life that had been mythologized in exile and irrevocably altered by occupation. Badran, by contrast, uses a fantastic vocabulary to address the actual landscape she saw before her: chaotic, overpopulated camps where movement was tightly restricted, sanitation was subpar, and resources were scarce. While the landscapes of most of her peers centered and drew from memory, both personal and collective, Badran’s are urgent, immediate responses to the realities of the present as they unfolded before her. This paper puts these innovative, singular drawings in conversation with the more mainstream trends of the era, asking how their divergent constructions of the relationship between fantasy and reality provide alternative perspectives on the place of the landscape in Palestinian political thinking.

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.

The myths around the construction of collectivities and its origins frequently genderize the nation and tend to present it as female. This phenomenon, which can be considered as a common and transcultural feature, materializes in different representations of nations, regions, continents or feminized entities. In certain narratives about the conquest of territories and war, the myth of the "empty land" is simultaneously the myth of the "virgin land" that is passively awaiting male insemination (McClintock, 1993). Palestine is no exception to the genderized representation of the nation. Palestine has been feminized in the collective imagination and cultural and political expressions refer to Palestine as a woman. The female representation of the land as a symbol is specially meaningfull because the expulsion of territories has been one of the consequences of the Israeli occupation. The origins of the people, the land and steadfastness have been important aspects against a regime that has colonized only the land. This paper addresses the feminization of the Palestinian nation and its representation through the landscape. It will center on a selection of works of Palestinian artists from 1970 until the beginning of 1990. During the seventies, Palestinian artist had represented the Landscape and blended it with images of women, they had become a part of it and a symbol of the nation. The present paper seeks to explain how works of art become a medium to express loss, to reaffirm traditions and to shape identity through the representation of the landscape in a context of occupation and repression by Israeli military laws. In order to do the analysis, the paper will use the concepts of Mitchell (1994) to understand the visual language of art. The paper will also analyze some important symbols that appear in the works of art that also represent identity and tradition such as the olive trees and the traditional dresses. The research on this paper has led us to the following findings. First, the representation of the Palestinian landscape depicts an image that goes back to an idyllic landscape and that is related to the peasant and to a specific representation of women. In addition, it also brings into light the fact that the image created in the paintings contribute to shape Palestinian identity.