[-empyre-] Week 2 of the April 2018 discussion: New Media Documentary Practice (Garrett Lynch)

[Dorit Naaman]

Thank you, Dale, for the invitation to participate in this discussion. Invisible Geographies are often at the root of what enables political amnesia. My project “Jerusalem, We Are Here” www.jerusalemwearehere.com<http://www.jerusalemwearehere.com> is an interactive doc that digitally re-inscribes Palestinians back into the neighborhoods from which they were dispossessed by the 1948 war.  Most Jerusalemites know that the best neighborhoods in Jerusalem were Arab neighborhoods, but hardly anyone thinks about the people who lived in those houses, the Palestinians who lost everything by that war.  Similarly, hardly ever do the Anishnabe and Haudenosaune people of Katarokwi, considered in what is now Kingston, Ontario, Canada, or my other home.  The political and historical conditions of erasure are different, of course, but the fact remains that the present dominates our sense of space, and it is not easy to see that which is not materially present in-front of us.

My impetus to make “Jerusalem, We Are Here” was born out of a sense of urgent need to make visible, that which has been erased and obfuscated. Digital media enabled a platform in which we can navigate the Israeli present tense visually (through google streetview and our own intervention), but are surrounded by a soundscape that is Palestinian and from the 1940s. As we meander virtually down the streets of Jerusalem, we meet participants who collaboratively made short films about their homes.

In a sense I try to de-territorialize (to use Garrett and Frederique’s suggestion) a space, in order to defamiliarize it for Israelis, and invite the Palestinians back, without a need for permits, checkpoints, and intense Israeli scrutiny and surveillance.  But I also hope to ignite a question mark about the spaces we inhabit more generally, a question about what is it that we don’t see, and why?

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