“I’ve never made any picture, good or bad, without paying for it in emotional turmoil.”
    W. Eugene Smith

When the features of this project began to take shape, its concept seemed to be centred around the question of ‘why/where did one of my shoes disappear to?!’, a question that can be applied to those who were wounded during the Great March of Return and whose injuries led to the amputation of their feet. Firstly, it was expected that the course of the project would be clear in terms of the research into the context of this question, not because of any cognitive necessity but rather because it is a question that carries great disapproval and exclamation and through which I express the most embarrassing political-humanitarian intersections, given that it is all addressed through researching personal details related to real stories. Secondly, actions will not perform realistic treatments insofar as they contribute to going back in time and evoking what was impossible to record as a collective memory to redesignate it as such by recombining it into a visual novel.

After conducting interviews, and following the impact of the political events centering around the emergence of the annexation plan that coincided with the period of research in the project, my path began to move towards linking physical amputation and geographic amputation, and the possibility of transforming these questions from those concerning the special case of the wounded to a more general project revolving around whether the overall picture is only a reflection of the impact of this amputation. I would not have come close to making this linking if I had not begun to meet with the wounded from the Great March of Return, especially when one of those who I interviewed told me about the pain he felt in the bones, in the metatarsal and toes of his left foot, yet when he looked down at his foot it was not there. His condition, and the delays in dealing with the transferring of patients, did not enable him to have an artificial limb fitted, and this was two years after his injury that I met him. I thought then how it hurts us, whether it is, figuratively speaking, our amputated body parts or our homeland. And if the wounded live with this loss, painful challenges will remain with them throughout their lives. How do we share the pain of this loss? Can we feel the imbalance that they felt after their amputation? How does our injury affect our social lives, our aspirations and dreams? More importantly, did we live their most painful moment, when they reach out to the void of an amputated foot only to find there is nothing there? Have we tried hard to adapt to prosthetics as an alternative? 

In spite of the momentum of the images that came from asking these questions, how to visualise them was not easy. These enquiries led me to thinking about how can we adopt the physical pain of another person, following an interview in which it is difficult to arrive at a spontaneous conversation that leads to personal stories? And how can this pain be reflected formally and visually, and, at the same time, express the act of geographical disassembly and be something that expresses my own pain. Meanwhile, the visual research began with ink sketches, in which I quote the lines resulting from the demarcation of boundaries, and in the same space there were figures, and an examination of the composition and the states that the characters reflect, and through this experience, questions emerged that pour into the context of the linking that I seek in this metaphor. Is it the geography that is amputated, or is it ourselves? For years we were referred to as uprooted as a result of the Nakba of 1948 and its aftermath. As this experience began to transfer itself onto the surface of the canvas, all previous imaginations of the works, characters, colour spaces and formations gradually dissipated, which is what I wanted from the sketches by simply standing in front of it. All these accumulations have turned into two spaces of darkness and light. The shadow space includes many components associated with absence as a concept, and perhaps an invisible presence – or as it was previously likened to the emptiness of an amputated foot, as Shaker Hassan Al Said recalls: “Our feeling of the world is a relative presence...  it is our own existence. While our absence is our eternal presence."
Where does our sense of the world and its proportions lie, and do we now feel this pain acknowledging our eternal presence? At this point, I captured all the intersections. This experiment was not just an approximation between two petals, but more a frequency of the same image. The image of Earth and Man. And I am not looking at this outside of the scene. I am completely in the dark, and all of these attempts are attempts to go out to the light, or to bring it or make this eternal presence less painful, and as long as none of this has been achieved the work on this project is ongoing.


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