Punctuated Land

Punctuated Land is a photographic project that explores a landscape that is shaped by ongoing conflict. The title of this project alludes to a land that is punctuated by myriad intertwined histories, collective memories and myths.

Punctuated Land is a photographic project that explores the enduring legacies of conflict and the historical and political forces that enable and perpetuate its normalisation through photography. Recurring visits to Israel/Palestine, tracing Israel’s de facto borders, and spending time in the occupied territories of the West Bank, were methods of observing how conflict gets inscribed on the verges and in the overlooked.

The landscape and its photographic representation become the means to encounter and record the impact of maintaining dominance over the land. Practices of control and discrimination in the landscape operate in the use of language, the interpretation of local laws and the exercise of power over access and restrictions. Daily routines of Israeli military forces and the state’s designation of land for security purposes intentionally clash and disrupt attempts of Palestinians to build homes, and to inhabit and cultivate the land, leaving sites that are caught in a cycle of construction and destruction in the desert landscape.

While the mechanisms of violence and occupation promote a vision of the land as desolate and barren, this project explores poetic and subtle visual methods to capture and highlight the traces of human presence. Signs of erasure, displacement and political violence are indicative of ongoing conflict and manifest in myriad ways in the overlooked - in what is found on the verges.