Video Out

Canada Park

I walk on snow to fall unto the desert. I find myself on unceded indigenous territory in so called Canada, an exile unable to return to Palestine. I trespass the colonial border as a digital spectre floating through Ayalon-Canada Park, transplanted over three Palestinian villages razed by the Israeli Defense Forces in 1967.
Canada Park is an experimental video poem exploring the politics of dis/appearance of Palestine as narrativized, mapped and imaged in Google Streetview and early 20th century colonial landscape photography of the ‘Holy Land’, namely at the site of the village of Imwas which is theologically conflated with Emmaus, a village cited in the bible. Imwas is erased and Emmaus marked a religious touristic site in the park, a self-fulfilled scriptural and algorithmic prophecy.
The park is located between what is commonly known as No Man’s Land and Jerusalem. The film explores this absurd space of suspension to create a counter mythology of this place against the religious, geopolitical and capitalist forces that actuated their imaginings on Palestine, people and land by reinserting the few images documenting the March of Return to Latroun that took place on June 16, 2007. Imwas is not erased. It is buried underground, an undercommons, an elsewhere here, where colonialism no longer makes sense.
I wake up again, feet on the ground in so called Canada; another park, Iroquois Mohawk territory. I walk on snow to fall unto the desert.